This prompted a memory of something I read in one of my undergrad psychology books a few years ago, which is probably referencing the same study, though using two different examples and one the same as the above example (though the phrasing is slightly different). Here is the extract:
Hindsight (After-the-Fact understanding)
Many people erroneously believe that psychology is nothing more than common sense. "I knew that all along!" or "They had to do a study to find that out?" are common responses to some psychological research. For example, decades ago a New York Times book reviewer criticized a report titled The American Soldier (Stouffer et al., 1949a,1949b), which summarized the results of a study of the attitudes and behavior of U.S. soldiers during World War II. The reviewer blasted the government for spending a lot of money to "tell us nothing we don't already know."
Compared to White soldiers, Black soldiers were less motivated to become officers.
During basic training, soldiers from rural areas had higher morale and adapted better than soldiers from large cities.
Soldiers in Europe were more motivated to return home while the fighting was going on than they were after the war ended.
You should have no difficulty explaining these results. Typical reasoning might go something like this: (1) Due to widespread prejudice, Black soldiers knew that they had little chance of becoming officers. Why should they torment themselves wanting something that was unattainable? (2) It's obvious that the rigors of basic training would seem easier to people from farm settings, who were used to hard work and rising at the crack of dawn. (3) Any sane person would have wanted to go home while bullets were flying and people were dying.
Did your explanations resemble these? If so, they are perfectly reasonable. There is one catch, however. The results of the actual study were the opposite of the preceding statements. in fact, Black soldiers were more motivated than White soldiers to become officers, city boys had a higher morale than farm boys during basic training, and soldiers were more eager to return home after the war ended than during the fighting. When told these actual results, our students quickly found explanations for them. In short, it is easy to arrive at reasonable after-the-fact explanations for almost any result.
Source:Pass, M. W. & Smith, R.E. (2007) Psychology:The Science of Mind and Behavior (Third Edition). McGraw HIll: Boston, pages 31-32
In hindsight, I guess I must have known that it would be a good idea to hang on to my undergrad textbooks. Or did I?
I smelled a rat immediately and decided to evaluate all five statements as if they had been randomly replaced with their opposites, or not. All five sounded wrong to me, I could think of rationalizations on each side but the rationalizations for the way they were actually presented sounded more forced.
This essay is closely based on an excerpt from Meyers’s Exploring Social Psychology; the excerpt is worth reading in its entirety.
Cullen Murphy, editor of The Atlantic, said that the social sciences turn up “no ideas or conclusions that can’t be found in [any] encyclopedia of quotations . . . Day after day social scientists go out into the world. Day after day they discover that people’s behavior is pretty much what you’d expect.”
Of course, the “expectation” is all hindsight. (Hindsight bias: Subjects who know the actual answer to a question assign much higher probabilities they “would have” guessed for that answer, compared to subjects who must guess without knowing the answer.)
The historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. dismissed scientific studies of World War II soldiers’ experiences as “ponderous demonstrations” of common sense. For example:
How many of these findings do you think you could have predicted in advance? Three out of five? Four out of five? Are there any cases where you would have predicted the opposite—where your model takes a hit? Take a moment to think before continuing . . .
. . .
In this demonstration (from Paul Lazarsfeld by way of Meyers), all of the findings above are the opposite of what was actually found.1 How many times did you think your model took a hit? How many times did you admit you would have been wrong? That’s how good your model really was. The measure of your strength as a rationalist is your ability to be more confused by fiction than by reality.
Unless, of course, I reversed the results again. What do you think?
Do your thought processes at this point, where you really don’t know the answer, feel different from the thought processes you used to rationalize either side of the “known” answer?
Daphna Baratz exposed college students to pairs of supposed findings, one true (“In prosperous times people spend a larger portion of their income than during a recession”) and one the truth’s opposite.2 In both sides of the pair, students rated the supposed finding as what they “would have predicted.” Perfectly standard hindsight bias.
Which leads people to think they have no need for science, because they “could have predicted” that.
(Just as you would expect, right?)
Hindsight will lead us to systematically undervalue the surprisingness of scientific findings, especially the discoveries we understand—the ones that seem real to us, the ones we can retrofit into our models of the world. If you understand neurology or physics and read news in that topic, then you probably underestimate the surprisingness of findings in those fields too. This unfairly devalues the contribution of the researchers; and worse, will prevent you from noticing when you are seeing evidence that doesn’t fit what you really would have expected.
We need to make a conscious effort to be shocked enough.
1 Paul F. Lazarsfeld, “The American Solidier—An Expository Review,” Public Opinion Quarterly 13, no. 3 (1949): 377–404.
2 Daphna Baratz, How Justified Is the “Obvious” Reaction? (Stanford University, 1983).