I knew it all along: Why The Past Seems Predictable

Have you ever looked back at something that happened and thought, “I knew it all along”?

In this episode of Circuit Breaker: Rewiring Your Decisions, we explore Hindsight Bias — the tendency to see an outcome as more predictable after we already know what happened. We look at how our memories and interpretations can shift, making the past seem more obvious than it really was.

But if the outcome feels inevitable in hindsight, how accurately do we remember what we thought beforehand? Discover how hindsight bias can shape our confidence, distort our memories, and influence the way we judge our own decisions — and those of others.

Studies and links

• Hindsight^Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment Under Uncertainty | Baruch Fischhoff Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel | Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance 1975, Vol. 1, No. 3, 288-299 | Massachusetts Institute of Technology Fischhoff_1975_Hindsight_is_not_equal_to_foresight.pdf
• Hindsight Bias | The Decision Lab Hindsight Bias - The Decision Lab