Possibility of hindsight bias occurring when reading consumer issue cases

Abstract

The damage caused by fraud and consumer issues remains significant in Japan, although various cases have been widely introduced in consumer education. We hypothesize that hindsight bias would reduce or reverse the warning effects in these cases. Hindsight bias refers to the cognitive tendency to believe that one has predicted an event's outcome after it has occurred, even though it was previously unpredictable. Participants read sentences sequentially regarding a scenario involving a potential victim (A) and a potential fraudster (B). Half of the participants were told that the scenario concerned an actual consumer issue (consumer issue condition). In contrast, the others were told it was a daily (control condition) event. After each sentence, they judged whether the character B was trustworthy. The results showed that participants in the consumer issue condition judged the character B as untrustworthy earlier than those in the control condition. This suggests that hindsight bias occurs when individuals read consumer issue cases, potentially leading to unintended overconfidence in their judgments.

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