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Published December 2012 | public
Journal Article

Shared Visual Attention Reduces Hindsight Bias

Abstract

Hindsight bias is the tendency to retrospectively think of outcomes as being more foreseeable than they actually were. It is a robust judgment bias and is difficult to correct (or "debias"). In the experiments reported here, we used a visual paradigm in which performers decided whether blurred photos contained humans. Evaluators, who saw the photos unblurred and thus knew whether a human was present, estimated the proportion of participants who guessed whether a human was present. The evaluators exhibited visual hindsight bias in a way that matched earlier data from judgments of historical events surprisingly closely. Using eye tracking, we showed that a higher correlation between the gaze patterns of performers and evaluators (shared attention) is associated with lower hindsight bias. This association was validated by a causal method for debiasing: Showing the gaze patterns of the performers to the evaluators as they viewed the stimuli reduced the extent of hindsight bias.

Additional Information

© 2012 The Author(s). Received 9/14/11; Revision accepted 3/22/12. Published online before print October 18, 2012. We wish to thank Daniel M. Bernstein, Daniel J. Simons, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments on the manuscript. The authors declared that they had no conflicts of interest with respect to their authorship or the publication of this article. Funding: This research was funded by grants from Trilience Research (D.-A. W., C. F. C., and S. S.), the Betty and Gordon Moore Foundation (C. F. C. and S. W. W.), Tamagawa-Caltech Global COE program (C. F. C. and S. S.), and the CREST program of the Japan Science and Technology Agency (S. S.).

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
March 5, 2024