How to correct for a bias that stop us learning from our mistakes.

Research into entrepreneurs demonstrates a widespread bias in human thought. The hindsight bias is our tendency towards thinking that things must have turned out the way they actually have.

We display this bias across many different areas of life. The things that happen to us seem more like they were meant to happen. This is partly because of our drive to make sense of the world; it’s comforting to feel we can predict what is happening to us and why.

Under some circumstances, the hindsight bias is particularly strong:

1. The impression of inevitability. The hindsight bias is stronger when you can easily identify a possible cause of the event. For example, your bag was stolen because you’re a tourist.
2. The impression of foreseeability. The hindsight bias is stronger when you are you less surprised by what happened.

The hindsight bias can be a problem when it stops us learning from our mistakes. If the entrepreneurs knew how biased their estimates of success were, would they have done things differently? If trainee doctors think a diagnosis was obvious all along, how will they learn to consider alternatives?

So psychologists have looked at ways in which we can correct for the hindsight bias. The main one is forcing people to justify their judgements and think about alternative ways in which things could have turned out. This normally makes people see that things could easily have turned out differently.

Of course, now you know about the hindsight bias, and how it can be corrected, it seems pretty obvious, doesn’t it?