Hindsight Phenomenon In Time Estimation

We always experience various uncertainties in our life. The outcomes give us a feeling of inevitable, foreseeable, or make us to feel that we have known that. This phenomenon is called hindsight. Hindsight phenomenon refers to the tendency that people think that they are surer about the outcome than they actually would have been, or change their forecasts to favor the actual result after the event.There are extremely abundant research achievements about this phenomenon for it has caught so many researchers'eyes over the past decades. This phenomenon has been found with different domains, samples and materials. Like in the domains studied so far, it is probably the uncertainty of judgment that determines whether or not hindsight bias will be observed. We would therefore expect that time estimation, too, show hindsight.There are two main theoretical explanations of hindsight:motivational view and cognitive view. More researchers prefer the latter, for example, someone claimed that it's the cognitive difference between these two main designs of hindsight research, ignoring the motivational factors. Motivational factors may supplement cognitive accounts of hindsight bias, rather than compete with them. On the other hand, separate components view has been proposed recently to instead of unitary phenomenon view, which holds that hindsight phenomenon actually involves three separate components. If so, the difference between these two designs should not be cognitive, but also be motivational. Existence of this difference may due to the separate components of hindsight these two designs represent. That is to say, these two designs involve different cognitive and motivational process for they represent different components of hindsight phenomenon. So, different results can be observed.This paper tested the hindsight phenomenon in time estimation with two studies, and finds that:(1)This paper successfully extended the domain of hindsight bias to time estimation, and confirmed its universality.(2)The consistent result with prior research was observed:the hindsight bias of hypothetical design is larger than memory design. But the difference is not just caused by the difference cognitive reasons as Schwarz has claimed. Motivational difference should also take into consideration.(3)The hindsight bias of different designs may represent different components of hindsight, which be differently effected by motivation and cognitive factors. Therefore, they should be investigated and interpreted as subphenomena.