Hindsight bias, sometimes called the knew-it-all-along effect, is the tendency for people to see a past event as having been more predictable than it actually was before it happened. After learning an outcome, people systematically overestimate what they would have predicted in advance, which distorts their memory of their own prior knowledge and can make chance or unforeseeable events feel obvious in retrospect. The psychologist Baruch Fischhoff gave the effect its formal experimental description in 1975, building on his own earlier observations from 1973.
Facts
Core ClaimOnce people know how an event turned out, they overestimate how predictable that outcome was beforehand, and misremember their own prior uncertainty. 1 First Described Year Cross-Tradition Connections
Sources
1. Wikipedia: Hindsight Bias
Wikimedia FoundationLead sectionQuote, Lead section
After an event has occurred, people often believe that they could have predicted or perhaps even known with a high degree of certainty what the outcome of the event would be before it occurred.
1. Wikipedia: Hindsight Bias
Wikimedia FoundationHistory section
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