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‘I Knew It All Along…Didn’t I?’ – Understanding Hindsight Bias
The fourth-quarter comeback to win the game. The tumor that appeared on a second scan. The guy in accounting who was secretly embezzling company funds. The situation may be different each time, but we hear ourselves say it over and over again: “I knew it all along.” The problem is that too often we actually didn’t know it all along, we only feel as though we did. The phenomenon, which researchers refer to as "hindsight bias," is one of the most widely studied decision traps and has been documented in various domains, including medical diagnoses, accounting and auditing decisions, athletic competition, and political strategy.
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Storm psychology: Why do some people stay behind?
NBC: It’s the question so many of us have while watching news coverage of a hurricane or tropical storm like Isaac: Who are these people who don’t leave home even as an angry storm is advancing – and what are they thinking?! The short answer: For some, the up-and-leaving idea isn’t as easy as it sounds to those of us watching from a safe and dry distance. Actually, a 2009 article published in the journal Psychological Science sought to examine the reasons some people won’t evacuate, despite the urging or even mandates of city and state officials, by asking a group who would know: Hurricane Katrina survivors who weathered the storm at home.
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Timing is something
The Economist: Anyone who can get more than 6,500 academics to do one thing (except whisk them away to Hawaii for a conference) should be commended. But that was the sample size of professors for an experiment just published in Psychological Science, by Katherine Milkman of Wharton, Modupe Akinola of Columbia and Dolly Chugh of New York’s Stern school. The researchers set up an experiment in which made-up “prospective students” e-mailed 6,548 professors to set up a meeting. The researchers sought to answer a simple question: could something as small as the timing of a meeting increase discrimination against minorities and women?
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The Trick to Being Satisfied
MSN Living: Questionnaires and daily diary entries showed that fathers in particular expressed greater levels of happiness than men without children, says S. Katherine Nelson, lead study author and a doctoral candidate at University of California, Riverside. (For more dad-approved health tips and breaking news, sign up for the Men's Health Dads newsletter.) But if you don't have a mini-you following you around, here are three things that bring just as much satisfaction and meaning to your day-to-day routine.
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We Lie When Time Is Short and Fibbing Feels Justified
LiveScience: New research suggests a little time might make us more honest. A study found that people are most likely to lie when they are under time pressure to give an answer and they can justify the fib to themselves. In the study, a group of international researchers instructed about 70 adult participants to roll a die three times. The subjects, who were out of the researchers' view, were told to report only the outcome of their first roll, and they earned more money for a higher roll. Some were instructed to report the outcome within 20 seconds, and others had unlimited time to give an answer.
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Wealth equity? We all want it
Milwaukee-Wisconsin Journal Sentinel: New York Times' reporter Jeff Zeleney recently wrote that Mitt Romney and his allies were lacerating President Barack Obama as determined to expand government until the United States resembles Sweden. Think Paul Ryan or Tommy Thompson would disagree? But Romney, Ryan and Thompson might be surprised to find out that both Republicans and Democrats favor a distribution of wealth much more like Scandinavian countries than our own. Research by Harvard Business School's Michael Norton and Duke University's Dan Ariely also document how mistaken Americans are about wealth distribution and social mobility.
