How Hindsight Bias Makes You Annoying to be Around
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We all have that annoying friend whose favorite saying is, “I knew it!” after situations play out. Somehow, they’re some sort of psychic because after situations already happened, they say they knew it all along. If you watch the so-called “experts” that are brought onto the news, they always act like they knew what was going to happen as well. Either we’re living in a world of psychics, or they’re falling into one of the most annoying cognitive traps around.
The truth of the matter is that we absolutely suck at prediction, and the experts suck just as bad as we do. Philip Tetlock is the leading researcher when it comes to expert predictions, and he did one of the longest studies on the subject. In his book Superforecasting, Tetlock outlines how he had numerous experts predict outcomes of different events, and at the end of the study, he found out they were no better at predicting than the average person guessing. So, if the experts aren’t great at predictions, your silly friend probably isn’t that great either.
The issue is that we all succumb to hindsight bias, and this bias makes us think that we knew what was going to happen the whole time. Aside from it being irritating when your friend does this, what I’ve noticed is that we beat ourselves up over situations that we couldn’t have predicted. Jobs, relationships, business deals, and more go south, and sometimes it’s just pure randomness.
The other day, my girlfriend was telling me about this TikTok she saw where a guy was saying the smartest investment you could make is if you went back to some date and invested in some company before it blew up. This TikTok had the perfect comment on it, which said, “My favorite investment advice...time travel.” This pretty much sums up hindsight bias. If people knew what would be a hit, don’t you think the multi-billion dollar movie or music industry would only pump out hit albums? Wouldn’t publishers only publish the best books?
For a while, I became obsessed with the concept of luck versus skill. I wanted to understand why certain songs, movies, and books became so popular while others didn’t, even though the quality seemed pretty similar. Then, I came across one of my favorite books, Everything is Obvious (Once You Know the Answer) by Duncan Watts. Like Tetlock, Watts researches predictions and outcomes. Watts is a sociologist fascinated with human behavior, and he blames a lot of hindsight bias on something he calls “creeping determinism”.
Creeping determinism is when we pay less attention than we should to all of the different things that don’t happen, which leads to hindsight bias. We suck at counterfactual thinking, which is thinking of all the other possibilities that could have happened but didn’t, so we believe the outcomes were inevitable. Oftentimes, when you look at any situation, had one or two things not gone extremely right or extremely wrong, the outcomes would have been completely different. This is the same reason people trust psychics or even think they have psychic abilities. Our brains are wired to remember the hits and not the misses.
What’s insane to me is that due to the fact that most people aren’t familiar with numbers and statistics, hindsight bias makes people seem like geniuses. Think about how many billionaires are running our country just because they seem to have this flawless intuition even though a lot of it is based on luck, but hindsight bias and creeping determinism makes people believe they’re some sort of prophet.
The reality is that we’re control freaks, and we don’t want to acknowledge how random life actually is. But now that you know about hindsight bias and how bad we are at predicting, my suggestion to you is to learn about risk management from authors like Michele Wucker as well as books to become a better thinker.
I’ve been working on organizing all the books I’ve read, and I have multiple lists of books on becoming a better thinker. There are lists for education, social issues, critical thinking, self-deception, and biases. For the rest of the categories, click here.
I’m always open for a conversation and to be shown what I might be missing or where I may be wrong, so feel free to email me at TheRewiredSoul@gmail.com