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

Birch, Susan; Bernstein, Daniel M.

doi:10.1521/soco.2007.25.1.98

Cited by 39 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 72 publications

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“…One consequence of this bias is that people tend to believe that others will interpret an ambiguous stimulus the same way they do (see "curse of knowledge," e.g., Camerer, Loewenstein, & Weber, 1989; "false consensus effect," e.g., Ross, Greene, & House, 1977; and "hindsight bias," e.g., Fischhoff, 1975; cf. "theory of mind," e.g., Birch & Bernstein, 2007).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Knows What? Maintaining Multiple Perspectives During Reading

Weingartner

Klin

2009

Scientific Studies of Reading

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Recent findings (Keysar, 1994;Weingartner & Klin, 2005) have shown that readers are not always accurate at taking a story character's perspective. When readers evaluated a character's understanding of a written message, they mistakenly took into account information that was inaccessible to that character. The results from the three experiments reported here demonstrate that this "illusory transparency of intention" is not dependent on the message readers' communicative role: Even when the message was composed for one character but read by another, readers assumed that the message was understood as it was intended. The results are discussed in the context of two theoretical accounts for these perspective-taking errors: the "knowledge projection hypothesis," which appeals to readers' expectations about cooperative behavior during communication, and "construal," which attributes the illusory transparency of intention to a general cognitive bias that occurs during the perception of ambiguous stimuli.Part of the enjoyment involved in reading a story is experiencing the events through the eyes of the protagonist. Recent research has demonstrated that one result of taking the protagonist's perspective is that comprehension is influenced by their location, movement, thoughts, perceptual viewpoint, and goals (e.g.,

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who Knows What? Maintaining Multiple Perspectives During Reading

Weingartner

Klin

2009

Scientific Studies of Reading

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“…Despite the substantial literature on hindsight bias that exists for adults, there has been little work on the developmental origins and trajectory of hindsight bias (but see Bernstein et al, 2004;Birch & Bernstein, 2007;Pohl & Haracic, 2005). This stands in stark contrast to the domain of theory of mind in which research has focused on developmental issues.…”

Section: Hindsight Biasmentioning

confidence: 99%

Hindsight Bias and Developing Theories of Mind

et al. 2007

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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.

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“…Koehler and Beauregard called this an ''illusion of confirmation'' because the ''confirmation'' was an ''illusion'' produced by the advisor's estimate's contaminating influence on the advisees' estimates. Birch and Bernstein (2007) argued that hindsight bias research in adults bears a strong resemblance to Theory of Mind (ToM) research in children; they posited that the similarity between the two sets of findings rests on both children's and adults' difficulty in taking the perspective of a more naïve other or the perspective of the self in a more naïve state. These authors argued that both hindsight bias and ToM findings demonstrate a tendency for participants to be biased by their current states of knowledge when attempting to recreate a prior, less-informed knowledge state.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The effects of mental contamination on the hindsight bias: Source confusion determines success in disregarding knowledge

Marks

Arkes

2008

Behavioral Decision Making

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We present data from eight experiments in which we explored the effects of source confusion on the hindsight bias; participants' success in disregarding information when they were instructed to do so was affected by participants' level of source confusion. In Experiment 1 we demonstrated participants' failure to disregard Revolutionary War information they recently learned while reading an essay; this failure to discount was not affected by participants' essay reading times (Experiment 1a). In Experiment 2 participants successfully discounted obscure War of 1812 information; this discounted information remained available in memory (Experiment 2a). In a direct test of source confusion (Experiment 3) we showed that participants discriminated between presented and not-presented War of 1812 information better than they discriminated presented and not-presented Revolutionary War information. In Experiments 4 and 4a we tested and rejected a motivational explanation for our findings, namely that subjects voluntarily withheld information when asked to disregard it. We tested a debiasing technique in Experiment 5 and found it was successful in helping participants discount familiar information. Results throughout are discussed as being attributable to source confusion.

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

Cited by 39 publications

References 72 publications

Who Knows What? Maintaining Multiple Perspectives During Reading

Who Knows What? Maintaining Multiple Perspectives During Reading

Hindsight Bias and Developing Theories of Mind

The effects of mental contamination on the hindsight bias: Source confusion determines success in disregarding knowledge

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