Cultural Differences in Counterfactual Thinking and the Hindsight Bias

Abstract

Three experiments compared the impact of counterfactual thinking (imagining alternatives to reality) on the hindsight bias (the pervasive tendency for people to believe that an outcome was more predictable in retrospect than it actually was a priori) for Chinese versus American participants. Contrary to previous findings, Chinese participants did not always exhibit a greater hindsight bias than their Western counterparts after event outcomes — indeed sometimes Americans exhibited a greater bias. Moreover, contrary to previous theory suggesting that cultural differences in hindsight bias stem from cultural differences in analytic versus holistic thinking style, the hindsight bias was not accounted for by an individual measure of holistic versus analytic thinking. Instead, our findings suggest that (1) how counterfactual thinking affects the hindsight bias depends on the type of counterfactuals participants generated, and (2) cultural differences in the hindsight bias may stem from East Asians judging different counterfactuals to be different in type, and in particular to be more or less effective and controllable.