The Role of Surprise in Hindsight Bias: A Metacognitive Model of Reduced and Reversed Hindsight Bias

Abstract

Hindsight bias is the well-researched phenomenon in which people falsely believe that they would have correctly predicted the outcome of an event once it is known. In recent years, several authors have doubted the ubiquity of the effect and have reported a reversal under certain conditions. This article presents an integrative model on the role of surprise as one factor explaining the malleability of hindsight bias. Three ways in which surprise influences the reconstruction of pre–outcome predictions are assumed: (1) Surprise is used as a direct metacognitive heuristic to estimate the distance between outcome and prediction, (2) surprise triggers a deliberate sense–making process, and (3) it also biases this process by enhancing the retrieval of surprise–congruent information and expectancy–based hypothesis testing.

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