Debiasing the hindsight bias: A review

The hindsight bias is one of the most widely studied judgement biases in the literature (Christensen-Szalanski & Willham, 1991), and has been found to be quite robust across a variety of content domains and tasks. The present paper aimed to examine research that has been conducted on debiasing the hindsight bias. The focus of the review was to examine the three debiasing manipulations most commonly cited in the literature: instructional manipulation, counterfactual reasoning, and discrediting procedures (Pohl & Hell 1996). The second goal of the review was to determine the feasibility of conducting a meta-analysis on the collected literature. An analysis of the collected data revealed that counterfactual reasoning is the most reliable debiasing technique while instructional manipulation is the most unreliable. It was also concluded that the studies collected for the review did not meet the criteria for conducting a meta-analysis.