Hindsight bias is known as the knew-it-all-along experience. It is when people convince themselves that they already knew the outcome of an event after the fact. For example, when someone says "I knew he was going to say that" or "I knew that was going to happen" after the event has occurred.
“People are generally not aware of their hindsight bias. However, even when you make people aware, they still tend to show the bias,” says Dr. Daniel Bernstein, Canada Research Chair in lifespan cognition and a psychology instructor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University (KPU).
To find out what other aspects of the human experience hindsight bias affects, researchers at KPU studied emotional hindsight bias. They asked whether a previous event causes us to anticipate feelings before we know what the other person is feeling.
“In general, people tend to preferentially process emotional stimuli, and particularly emotional faces, and we wondered whether this would impact people’s tendency to exhibit hindsight bias,” says Megan Giroux, a Simon Fraser University (SFU) student who worked on the project at the Lifespan Cognition lab at KPU.
The research was conducted by then KPU and SFU students Giroux, Michelle Hunsche, and Ragav Kumar under the supervision of Dr. Bernstein. The results of their study have now been published in the journal, Emotion.
Researchers showed participants, the majority of whom were students, a wide range of images of people with various emotions – anger, disgust, happiness, fright and surprise. The 15 photos of each emotion started out blurry and then gradually became sharper. The participant stopped the photos when they knew what the emotion was.
After going through all the sets of photos showing different emotions, the process was repeated with the same photos and emotions. The researchers found hindsight bias where participants stopped the faces earlier when they knew what the emotion was.
The one emotion that they did not find hindsight bias for was happiness.
“We were surprised to consistently find that people did not exhibit hindsight bias for happy faces. At this point, we don’t have a definitive answer as to why this occurred. We explored a few different explanations through both experimental manipulations and also modelling our data to reveal latent processes that may be operating,” says Hunsche, a KPU student at the time.
The researchers say neither of these explorations revealed why people exhibited hindsight bias for all emotions except happiness, but there is compelling evidence that there is something unique about happy faces that made people less likely to overestimate when they initially identified the emotion.
Identifying others’ emotional states is essential to functional relationships and social interactions, say the researchers. But hindsight bias can lead us to think we accurately understood another person’s emotional state when we did not.
“This may prevent us from responding appropriately to how they are feeling or perhaps even give ourselves undue credit for identifying how they were feeling more quickly than we actually did,” adds Giroux.
“For example, once we know what our partner or friend was feeling, it may matter more that we update our behaviour to support them through a negative feeling than a positive feeling. In other words, we might actually have a harder time ignoring our knowledge of one’s negative emotions in hindsight because it is more critical for us to update our knowledge of one’s negative emotional expressions than their positive expressions.”
The researchers are working on other areas of hindsight bias, including how depression and age affect this bias.