The research shows that both participants will distort their memory of their own past judgment and gravitate toward their current knowledge. Thus, suppose, that Participant 1 says that the Statue of Liberty is “200 feet” and Participant 2 says, “100 feet.” They then receive the correct answer (“151 feet”) and must recall their original answer. In the memory design, which we used in Experiment 2, participants must recall their original answer to a problem after receiving feedback about the correct answer. The participant says, “175 feet.” In actuality, a naïve person would rarely be this accurate, and the research shows that if the participant is not given prior knowledge about the height of the Statue of Liberty, she does not attribute such an accurate answer to the naïve person. Next she is asked to estimate what a naïve other would say if asked this same question.
For instance, a participant receives the answer to a challenging question: the Statue of Liberty is 151 feet from base to torch. In the hypothetical design, which we used in Experiment 1, participants who know the outcome to a question must estimate what they themselves or a naïve peer knows or would have thought without the benefit of outcome knowledge. Both yield comparable levels of hindsight bias. Hindsight bias has been measured using two experimental designs: the hypothetical design and the memory design ( Pohl, 2004). In each case, people armed with advance knowledge of an outcome overestimate the likelihood of that particular outcome, in essence claiming that they “knew it all along” ( Wood, 1978). Hindsight bias in adults has been documented in many domains, including legal decisions ( Harley, 2007 Kamin & Rachlinski, 1995), medical diagnoses ( Arkes, Wortman, Saville, & Harkness, 1981), consumer satisfaction ( Zwick, Pieters, & Baumgartner, 1995), sporting events, and election outcomes ( Leary, 1981, 1982). We will begin by discussing hindsight bias and ToM and the ways these constructs relate. However, to date, there has not been a systematic study of whether and how hindsight bias and ToM relate. There has been some empirical and theoretical work suggesting that aspects of ToM development may be related to a general, lifelong cognitive bias wherein one’s own current knowledge warps judgments about the beliefs of a naïve other or the prior self ( Atance & Meltzoff, 2006 Bernstein, Atance, Loftus, & Meltzoff, 2004 Birch & Bloom, 2003, 2004 Epley, Morewedge, & Keysar, 2004 Jacobs & Klaczynski, 2002 Keysar, Lin, & Barr, 2003 Royzman, Cassidy & Baron, 2003 Taylor, 1988 Taylor, Esbensen, & Bennett, 1994). The concepts of hindsight bias and ToM are related: both involve perspective taking and the misattribution of knowledge to the past self or a current other. Typically, success on this task occurs between 4 and 5 years of age (e.g., Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001).
To pass this task, children must not be swayed unduly by their own knowledge about the actual state of the world. For example, in the classic false belief task involving a change in location, children must reason about a character who does not share their own knowledge. Interestingly, having to ignore or override one’s own current knowledge is a component of many tasks used to assess theory of mind (ToM) in young children.
For instance, armed with the knowledge that New Orleans suffered a devastating flood, we are more apt to think that “we knew it would happen all along.” In hindsight bias one’s present knowledge influences one’s recollection of previous beliefs. It occurs when outcome knowledge influences the judgments we make for a naïve other or a naïve “prior” self. Hindsight bias is typically studied in cognitive and social psychology.
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