The Know-It-All Along Effect

Known as the “knew-it-all-along” effect, the hindsight bias is the tendency to overestimate one’s abilities and claim to have known the outcome of the event before the actual event occurred. Three variables that contribute to this bias are memory distortion, inevitability, and foreseeability. Inevitably, this bias has the potential to induce negative consequences, such as myopia, which occurs when people focus on a single aspect and fail to consider other explanations, and overconfidence in judgment and memory.
Hindsight is influenced and derives from cognitive and motivational inputs. Cognitive inputs are when people remember specific information which they can confirm that has happened. On the other hand, motivational inputs reflect people’s