Research On College Students’ Hindsight Bias And Its Influencing Factors

Hindsight bias refers to the "after things" opinion which will be more inevitable and more predictable than the former estimation. Hindsight bias is a common cross-cultural cognitive problem, including medical diagnosis, legal decisions, labor disputes, customer satisfaction, sporting events, election results and other aspects across studies with age, but in education researches, there are more focus on the learning problems of children or pupils. For examination result-oriented cases there is little study or report. Many teachers and students may change their views according to the test scores and, these views are likely to be accompanied with the students’ life. It makes students have wrong awareness on self-evaluation and real circumstances about the degree they learned. So the verification of hindsight bias existing in college students, what factors will have an impact on it, and the possible measures which could reduce the impact of hindsight bias, may allowing teachers and students fully recognize themselves and understand things more comprehensive and objective to avoid adverse effects caused by hindsight. These would have a strong theoretical and practical meaning.In these circumstances, our study try to verify the hindsight bias exists in education, and further observe the effects which task involvement and feedback type caused and the interactions they have to each other. Using literature, questionnaire and experimental method by designing stories, questionnaires and computer programs ourselves, four different experiments are used in this study. By using paper test and computer test, we fulfill4experiments and study the hindsight bias and its influencing factors. The first experiment aim to see how the result of feedback influence the hindsight bias; the second experiment aim to see the different influences on hindsight bias caused by different types of feedback; experiment3observes how the extent of involvement affect hindsight bias; experiment four main observe the interactions of different feedback types and extents of involvement affect hindsight bias.435college students from Chuzhou were sampled, and come to four main conclusions as followed:1hindsight bias exists in colleges, and a significant difference exists in result estimation, predictable impression scores and inevitability impression scores.2whether a positive or a negative feedback may cause hindsight bias, hindsight bias offset corresponding to the direction of the feedback results.3the level of involvement could affect hindsight bias, especially under high pressure situations.4Interaction exists in the levels of involvement and feedback types. When both are present, the levels of involvement tend to dominate hindsight bias.