Older and younger adults\u2019 hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes

Julia Groß,Ute J Bayen

doi:10.3758/s13421-021-01195-w

Julia Groß, Ute J Bayen

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-021-01195-w

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Abstract

After learning about facts or outcomes of events, people overestimate in hindsight what they knew in foresight. Prior research has shown that this hindsight bias is more pronounced in older than in younger adults. However, this robust finding is based primarily on a specific paradigm that requires generating and recalling numerical judgments to general knowledge questions that deal with emotionally neutral content. As older and younger adults tend to process positive and negative information differently, they might also show differences in hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes. Furthermore, hindsight bias can manifest itself as a bias in memory for prior given judgments, but also as retrospective impressions of inevitability and foreseeability. Currently, there is no research on age differences in all three manifestations of hindsight bias. In this study, younger (N = 46, 18–30 years) and older adults (N = 45, 64–90 years) listened to everyday-life scenarios that ended positively or negatively, recalled the expectation they previously held about the outcome (to measure the memory component of hindsight bias), and rated each outcome’s foreseeability and inevitability. Compared with younger adults, older adults recalled their prior expectations as closer to the actual outcomes (i.e., they showed a larger memory component of hindsight bias), and this age difference was more pronounced for negative than for positive outcomes. Inevitability and foreseeability impressions, however, did not differ between the age groups. Thus, there are age differences in hindsight bias after positive and negative outcomes, but only with regard to memory for prior judgments.

Highlights

When we look back on what we knew previously, we are often biased by what we know
We report our main results on age differences in the three components of hindsight bias—foreseeability, inevitability, and the memory component of hindsight bias—as a function of scenario outcome valence
We found age differences in hindsight bias in a paradigm with positive and negative event outcomes

Summary

Introduction

When we look back on what we knew previously, we are often biased by what we know now. We think that we “knew it all along” (Wood, 1978), we assign higher a priori probabilities to facts or outcomes (Fischhoff, 1975), and we misremember our prior predictions as closer to facts or actual outcomes (e.g., Erdfelder & Buchner, 1998) This cognitive illusion has been termed hindsight bias (for reviews, see Blank et al, 2007; Roese & Vohs, 2012) and is pervasive in a variety of everyday situations, such as in political elections, medical diagnoses, or scientific experiments (e.g., Arkes et al, 1981; Blank et al, 2003; Slovic & Fischhoff, 1977). We will refer to the bias measured in the memory paradigm as the memory component of hindsight bias.

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