One thing I've been wondering about in regards to hindsight bias is whether or not this is connected to the more extreme phenomenon with young children where they erroneously report their own prior beliefs. See for example Gopnik & Astington's 1988 paper in which children of around four years old are given a box that normally contains some object (say a pencil box) and are then shown what was actually in the box (some other thing such as candy). A large fraction of children in a certain age range will when asked what they thought was in the box will then say "candy" even as they clearly acted surprised. Moreover, in similar experiments children who fail at the task are much more likely when asked what other children will think is in the box to answer candy rather than pencils. So it almost seems like hindsight bias is a similar but less extreme example of the same thing which amounts to a combination of the illusion of transparency and failure to have an accurate theory of mind. I don't know the literature about hindsight bias enough to know if this point has been suggested before, but I suspect it has been.
Title: [SEQ RERUN] Hindsight Bias
Tags: sequence_reruns
Today's post, Hindsight Bias was originally published on 16 August 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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