I Knew It Would Happen: Remembered Probabilities of Once-Future Things
Baruch Fischhoff & Ruth Beyth · 1975
"Once we know how something turned out, we systematically misremember how predictable it felt beforehand — inflating our recalled certainty to match the now-known outcome, which creates a false sense that events were more foreseeable than they actually were."
Fischhoff and Beyth asked people to estimate the probability of various outcomes of Nixon's 1972 visits to China and the Soviet Union before the trips happened, then asked the same people afterward to recall what probability they had originally assigned. People systematically misremembered their own past estimates, recalling higher confidence for outcomes that actually happened and lower confidence for outcomes that didn't — a pattern Fischhoff called creeping determinism, the sense that what happened was destined to happen all along.
This matters beyond a curious memory quirk because it corrupts how we learn from the past: if you believe, falsely, that you predicted an outcome with high confidence, you don't investigate why you failed to act on that supposed foresight, and you judge other people's past decisions, a doctor's diagnosis, a general's battle plan, an executive's strategy, as more obviously wrong in hindsight than they were with the information actually available at the time, since you're implicitly using the now-known outcome to judge a decision that had to be made without it.
What did Fischhoff and Beyth's Nixon study demonstrate about memory?
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The explanation above is written with AI assistance. These are the originals — go to them to check it.
- Hindsight biasWikipedia
Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases (Anchoring)
"When estimating an unknown quantity, people rely heavily on the first number they're exposed to, the anchor, and adjust insufficiently away from it — even when that anchor is arbitrary, irrelevant, or explicitly randomly generated."