Hindsight Bias: The Role Of Individual Differences, Controlled Attributions And Result Presents

Hindsight bias refers to the phenomenon that once learning the outcome of an event or the answer to a question, individuals tend to inflate what could have been predicted in foresight. Many studies have demonstrated the ubiquity and stability of hindsight bias so far. However, only a few of hindsight bias studies investigated its internal mechanism.The paper employed three successive experiments, discussed the influence of individual differences, cognitive reconstruction and informational presentation on hindsight bias in various decision-making tasks (important news events, estimate of quantity and perspectives in human relationship) under the background of cross-culture. And the research also demonstrated the countermeasures through controlling the attributions, thought list and the time at which the correct answer was provided. Furthermore, the study re-examined the explanatory power of cognitive reconstruction hypothesis on hindsight bias.The main conclusions are as follows:1) Hindsight bias is ubiquity in Chinese subjects, and its influence is relatively independent despite of individual differences, deep encoding of original estimates and the framing attributions of the answers;2) Following strategies could weaken the hindsight bias: generate many alter natives; attribute task difficulty to the internal causes; and provide correct answers just after the original estimate;3) In the estimate of important news events, if the outcome were favorable to individual, hindsight bias would be greater when the outcome was self-relevant;4) The phenomenon of asymmetrical hindsight bias was verified both in positive and negative-framing conditions, in other words, subjects with outcome knowledge, regardless of true or false feedback, indeed showed more hindsight bias than those without knowledge.Thus, the above-mentioned results further demonstrated the explanatory power of cognitive reconstruction hypothesis to hindsight bias. In addition, hindsight bias was by products of adaptation in the development of human cognitive ability; but it wouldhinder human's ability to evaluate the past event objectively and impartially in a sense. So it is necessary to choose appropriate strategies to weaken or even eliminate the hindsight bias.