Hindsight Bias

After an event has occurred, individuals often believe that they knew it all along that the event would happen or that it was inevitable. This phenomenon is called hindsight bias and doing research concerning it accompanies us several years now. Some years ago, we investigated whether hindsight bias also occurs with personality judgments and we developed a new process model that integrates assumptions of the lens model on accurate personality judgments and accounts that view hindsight effects as a by-product of knowledge updating (see Nestler et al., 2012, below). In recent years, we examined--in collaboration with Aileen Oeberrst and Marcel Meurer--whether the bias is present in Wikipedia.

Representative publications:

Nestler, S., Egloff, B., Küfner, A. C. P., & Back, M. D. (2012). An integrative lens model approach to bias and accuracy in human inferences: Hindsight effects and knowledge updating in personality judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103, 698-717.

Meurer, M., von der Beck, I., Nestler, S., & Oeberst, A. (2021). What drives increases in hindsight impressions after the reception of biased media content? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 27, 461–472.

Meurer, M., Nestler, S., & Oeberst, A. (2021). Debiasing media articles - Reducing hindsight bias in the production of written work. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition, 10, 435-443.