I absolutely hate internet ads that have headlines along the lines of “Analyst Who Predicted Stock Market Crash Says Makes New Prediction.” These headlines are always nothing but clickbait, and reading Daniel Kahneman’s book Thinking Fast and Slow has given me even more reason to hate these types of headlines. They play on cognitive errors in our thinking, particularly our hindsight bias. When we look back at previous choices, decisions, and important events, whether in our individual lives or across the globe, our present state of being always seems inevitable. It was clear that the internet would lead to major social network platforms, and that those platforms would then contribute to major challenges and problems with misinformation, how could anyone fail to see this as far back as 2004?
The problem of course, is that the inevitable present moment and the pathway that seems so obvious in retrospect, was never clear at all. There was no way to predict a major housing bubble and financial collapse in 2008 if you were living in 2006. Headlines introducing some genius who saw what the rest of us couldn’t see before the Great Recession, and then claiming that this person has made another prediction are pulling at our emotions and playing with hindsight bias in a way that is deliberately misleading. The fact that someone made an unlikely prediction that came true is not a reason to believe they will be correct again in the future. If anything, we should expect some version of regression to the mean with their predictions, and assume that their next grand claim is wrong.
Rather than using hindsight bias to convince more people to follow links to bogus news stories, we should be more cautious with hindsight bias and our proclivity toward inaccurate heuristics. As Kahneman writes, “Hindsight is especially unkind to decision makers who act as agents for others—physicians, financial advisers, third-base coaches, CEOs, social workers, diplomats, politicians. We are prone to blame decision makers for good decisions that worked out badly and to give them too little credit for successful moves that appear obvious only after the fact. There is a clear outcome bias. When the outcomes are bad, the clients often blame their agents for not seeing the handwriting on the wall—forgetting that it was written in invisible ink that became legible only afterward. Actions that seemed prudent in foresight can look irresponsibly negligent in hindsight.”
Our key decision-makers can be punished by our hindsight bias. It can cloud our judgment for what we should expect in the future and lead us to trust individuals who don’t deserve trust, and mistrust those who are making the best possible decisions given a set of serious constraints. Hindsight bias deserves a greater recognition and more respect than use for misleading headlines.
Novel Learning 