The Definition Of Hindsight Bias And Overconfidence

Hindsight Bias and Overconfidence My best friend hears that I am taking a psychology class this semester. She finds me and lets me know that she thinks psychology is just common sense. Little does she know, psychology is all about hindsight Bias and overconfidence. I started to explain to her what hindsight bias is. I told he that hindsight bias is also known as the “I knew it all along phenomenon.” Meaning that common sense isn’t always the way to go. Common sense may be easily described now, but no human can predict what happens in the future, and that is why we need psychological research to predict. The book definition of hindsight bias is the tendency to believe after learning an outcome, that one would have for seen it. Basically this definition is saying that one person will believe any statement as long as it has and answer to back it up. Hindsight is why you can’t always trust your common sense answers. Hindsight also leads to overconfidence, which can also lead to faulty answers. …show more content…
Mainly because we can get overconfident. We get so confident about an answer, drilling the thought in our heads that it is correct, but we tend to be more confident the correct the majority of the time. When learning psychology one uses a lot of critical thinking to determine what they are studying. “Critical thinking, examines assumptions, discerns hidden values, evaluates evidence, and assesses conclusions” (p. 13). The reason critical thinking is important when studying psychology, is because psychology is all about asking questions. A critical thinker is always asking questions to everything they are studying/ reading. These three main reasons listed above is why I disagree with my best friend about psychology being common