Hindsight Bias and COVID-19: Hindsight wasn’t 20/20 in 2020

Hindsight bias occurs when outcome information distorts people’s memories of past beliefs or exaggerates perceptions of outcomes’ foreseeability or inevitability. We investigated whether community and university participants in Canada and the U.S. exhibited hindsight bias for COVID-19. In Experiment 1 (N = 175), participants made original judgments about COVID-19 outcomes. Two months later, participants learned outcome information and recalled their original judgments (memory design). They also rated the foreseeability and inevitability of COVID-19. In Experiment 2 (N = 754), we used a hypothetical design. Participants learned outcome information before estimating how naïve peers would have responded two months earlier. Participants exhibited hindsight bias in memory and hypothetical estimations. However, they rated COVID-19 as unforeseeable and avoidable and generally did not exhibit differences in foreseeability and inevitability ratings across the two timepoints. Thus, hindsight bias for COVID-19 differs across memory distortions, foreseeability, and inevitability and extends to hypothetical judgments.