Judgment and Decision Making

PART II

Hindsight bias

My first serious research project was my doctoral dissertation, on hindsight bias. It was inspired by Paul Meehl’s (1973) “Why I do not attend case conferences” and strongly influenced by Roberta Wohlstetter’s Pearl Harbor: Warning and Decision (1962), which meticulously dissected how the bias led to blaming Navy commander Kimmel (and President Roosevelt) for missing signals that were buried in noise before the attack. My contribution was devising experimental tasks that allowed clearly demonstrating the bias – as distinguished from the genuine learning that can come with knowing what happened – and evaluating alternative explanations.

“Hindsight ≠ foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty” ...