Can knowledge of election results change recall of our predictions? Neural correlates of political hindsight bias.

Yin-Hua Chen,Georg Northoff,Yu-Wen Lu,Pei-Hong Lee,Nai-Shing Yen,Hsu-Po Cheng,Mike E Le Pelley

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0220690

Abstract

Hindsight bias (HB) is the tendency to retrospectively exaggerate one’s foresight knowledge about the outcome of an event. Cognitive processes influenced by newly obtained outcome information are used to explain the HB phenomenon, but the neural correlates remain unknown. This study investigated HB in the context of election results using a memory design and functional magnetic resonance imaging for the first time. Participants were asked to predict and recall the percentage of votes obtained by (pairs of) candidates before and after an election. The results revealed that 88% of participants showed HB by recalling that their predictions were closer to the actual outcomes than they really were; and participants had HB for 38% of the events. The HB effect was associated with activation in the medial superior frontal gyrus and bilateral inferior frontal gyrus (IFG), which have been implicated in updating an old belief due to new information and is similar to the process of reconstruction bias. Furthermore, participants with a greater HB effect showed greater activation of the left IFG. In conclusion, we successfully observed the HB phenomenon in election results, and our imaging results suggested that the HB phenomenon might involve reconstruction bias.

Highlights

Hindsight bias (HB) is the tendency to retrospectively exaggerate one’s foresight knowledge about the outcome of an event [1,2]
As no study in the existing literature has ever used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the possible underlying cognitive processes of the HB phenomenon, especially using a memory design, we reviewed the studies that are conceptually similar to reconstruction bias; that is, information updating [31,32]
We found that 88% of participants showed evidence of the HB effect in at least one of the six tested conditions; across participants, we observed evidence for the HB effect in a sizeable proportion of the events (i.e., 38%), with a mean size of 7.75

Summary

Introduction

Hindsight bias (HB) is the tendency to retrospectively exaggerate one’s foresight knowledge about the outcome of an event [1,2]. Both cognitive and motivational factors have been proposed to account for HB; the empirical evidence for motivational factors is generally weak [3,4,5,8] in this study, we focused on cognitive factors. According to Hawkins and Hastie [3], when people are asked their original judgment after knowing the outcome of an event, they might recollect their old judgment from episodic long-term memory. The outcome information would prevent them from correctly recollecting the old judgment either by destroying or disturbing the memory trace of the original judgment or by reducing its accessibility [1]. HB due to recollection bias has been defined as the effect of outcome information on the direct-recall process [5]

Objectives

Results

Conclusion