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Hindsight Bias
“Once the outcome is known, the path leading to it looks suspiciously straight.”
01 / SUMMARY
In short
Learning an outcome can make people remember it as more predictable than it really was. New information reorganizes the story and makes the original uncertainty difficult to reconstruct.
03 / SCENE
In the wild
After an election surprise, commentators find signs that “foretold it,” although their earlier predictions had been divided.
04 / LIMIT
The limit
Explaining an outcome afterward does not itself prove bias; the problem is erasing alternatives that were reasonable beforehand.
FINAL NOTE
What remains
Record probabilities and reasons before the result; later memory preserves the earlier possibility space poorly.