Hindsight Bias and Developing Theories of Mind

Abstract

Although hindsight bias (the ''I knew it all along'' phenomenon) has been documented in adults, its development has not been investigated. This is despite the fact that hindsight bias errors closely resemble the errors children make on theory of mind (ToM) tasks. Two main goals of the present work were to (a) create a battery of hindsight tasks for preschoolers, and (b) assess the relation between children's performance on these and ToM tasks. In two experiments involving 144 preschoolers, 3-, 4-, and 5-year olds exhibited strong hindsight bias. Performance on hindsight and ToM tasks was significantly correlated independent of age, language ability, and inhibitory control. These findings contribute to a more comprehensive account of perspective taking across the lifespan.

Hypercorrection of high confidence errors in children

“…The results also suggested that the children believed, very frequently, and consistent with Hypothesis 2, they knew the correct answers all along. Whether their claim that they knew the answers all along was a pure hindsight bias, as has previously been demonstrated in children (Bernstein, Atance, Meltzoff, & Loftus, 2007) or whether it was an indication that they really did know, is the issue that is investigated in the next two experiments.…”

What Can Children Tell Us About Hindsight Bias: A Fundamental Constraint on Perspective–Taking?

“…Moreover, the magnitude of the bias remained stable from ages three to five in both experiments. In a pair of follow-up experiments, Bernstein and colleagues found mixed evidence for a developmental decline in hindsight bias between the ages of three and five (Bernstein, Atance, Meltzoff, & Loftus, 2007). Hence, the data on whether there are developmental changes in the magnitude of hindsight bias across the preschool period are limited and somewhat mixed.…”

Explaining individual differences in cognitive processes underlying hindsight bias

“…Interestingly, some cognitive abilities improve from young to middle adulthood followed by a decline in late adulthood (Kaufman, 2001;Thornton & Dumke, 2005). Researchers have investigated such nonlinear development trajectories of theory of mind (see Bernstein, Thornton, & Sommerville, 2011b), a social cognitive ability that is significantly correlated with HB (Bernstein, Atance, Meltzoff, & Loftus, 2007), but no work to date has implemented this approach in the HB literature.…”