Hindsight bias is a cognitive bias that can cause us to judge ourselves unfairly and learn less from our experiences than we could. You can find out what this is all about here.
When we perceive the world, organize it, judge it and form a picture of it, we don’t just see a very small section. We not only bring in experiences from our personal biography, and our interpretation is not only shaped by situational influences such as hormone status and intestinal activity. In addition to all the modifications we make in our conception of the world, which are incorporated into the story we tell ourselves, there are a whole series of systematic reasoning errors known as cognitive biases that arise from our human psyche and intelligence. For example, some may be concerned with confirmation bias, which means that we tend to understand new information in a way that confirms our existing assumptions and perspectives. Another such thinking error is called hindsight bias, and knowing this can be helpful because it can affect how we judge our behavior and what we learn from it.
Hindsight bias: Why we overestimate our past selves
The hindsight bias describes the phenomenon that, looking back later, we overestimate our knowledge and competence at an earlier point in time. For example, in a famous experiment that illustrates this cognitive bias, subjects were asked to name the height of the Eiffel Tower. Then they learned the correct height. A few hours or days later, they were asked to say how tall they thought the Eiffel Tower was at the beginning of the experiment. Most of the test subjects now named a value that was closer to the actual height of the Paris landmark than their actual information – even when those conducting the experiment told them that it was important that they remembered correctly. Once they knew the height of the Eiffel Tower, they could no longer imagine that they didn’t know it a while ago or could have been very wrong.
How the hindsight bias can promote feelings of shame and guilt
With the experiences we gain, especially through the mistakes and oversights we make and notice, we learn and tend to become wiser. For example, today we might not leave our bike outside for a winter, as our 18-year-old self once did, only to find it completely rusted the next spring. We would no longer say certain things that we now understand hurt other people, and we would make some decisions differently.
If we now look back at individual events in our past, at situations in which we behaved more stupidly or worse than we would have liked, the hindsight error can lead us to judge ourselves more harshly and harshly than is actually appropriate. Because our assessment is not based on our earlier, more ignorant version, but on our current self, a later, older version richer in experience. For whom it is far easier to act smarter.
This can result in us thinking “I should have seen that coming” or “I could have done that better” instead of “I didn’t know that at the time” or “I couldn’t do it better/differently at the time”. And that can then make it more difficult for us to forgive ourselves. It can make us feel ashamed and guilty and make us overlook the main thing: what we have learned. What wasn’t there in our previous version and is there more today.
How we can deal with hindsight bias
Neither the hindsight bias nor our other cognitive distortions are a valid reason to doubt our ability to lead a satisfying life – after all, many billions of people with these distortions have already demonstrated this ability. We may not see the world as it is and must make do with a mind that is systematically flawed. But because we are who we are, we can live as we live. If we look at how many people enjoy doing this and how attached most of them are to their lives, it can’t be too bad.
So we don’t need to desperately shake our not so brilliant heads and try to correct our cognitive distortions and correct our errors in perception and judgment – we probably wouldn’t be able to do that anyway. However, regardless of perfectionism and questions of truth, it can be enriching and helpful for us to know more about how we think and what influences our perceptions and evaluations. For us, for our self-image, our mood and our feelings, it can make a difference whether we believe that we have failed in the past and should have done something better. Or whether we realize that we only believe this – when in reality we simply couldn’t do any better, but are doing it today.