The Role Of Cognitive Load In Distinguishing Different Types Of Hindsight Bias

Hindsight bias refers to a biased representation of event when outcome information is known.In the past,hindsight bias is considered as a unitary phenomenon in many researches,however,hindsight bias may involve different psychological processes,including memory,causal reasoning and metacognitive processes,these researches end up using contradictory explanations.In order to alleviate these theories,Blank,Musch,and ohl(2007)suggest that hindsight bias can be divided into two types,based on the psychological mechanisms of the phenomenon,type one is automatic process oriented,type two is effortful process oriented.Combined with the component theory of Blank et al(2008),the present study suggests that hindsight bias can be divided into memory-based hindsight bias(automatic process oriented)and reasoning-based hindsight bias(effortful process oriented),and then tries to experimentally dissociate these two types of hindsight bias.Automatic process and effortful process play different roles in memory-based and reasoning-based hindsight bias.Considering that cognitive load has different influences on automatic process and effortful process,inhibiting effortful process but having no significant influence on automatic process,the present thesis tries to dissociate memory-based hindsight bias and reasoning-based hindsight bias by bringing in cognitive load.There are four experiments in the present thesis.Experiment 1 and 2 explore memory-based hindsight bias and reasoning-based hindsight bias respectively,and experiment 3 and 4 explore the effect of cognitive load on these two hindsight biases.Experiment 1 aims to explore memory-based hindsight bias,participants show memory-based hindsight bias when there is a feedback.Experiment 2 aims to explore reasoning-based hindsight bias,participants show reasoning-based hindsight bias when the outcome is known.Experiment 3 explores the effect of cognitive load on memory-based hindsight bias,participants show an increase in memory-based hindsight bias,when there is a cognitive load on the hindsight or foresight phase.Experiment 4 explores the effect of cognitive load on reasoning-based hindsight bias,the result shows that there is a decrease in reasoning-based hindsight bias when there is a cognitive load during the entire experiment.The results of the present thesis suggest that,1.Cognitive load has different effects on memory-based and reasoning-based hindsight bias,when there is a cognitive load,participants show an increase in memory-based hindsight bias and a decrease in reasoning-based hindsight bias.2.Memory-based hindsight bias is automatic process oriented,and reasoning-based hindsight bias is effortful process oriented...