The I-Knew-It-All-Along Phenomenon

                One problem with commonsense explanations is that we tend to invoke them after we know the facts. Events are far more “obvious” and predictable in hindsight than beforehand. As Baruch Fischhoff and his colleagues (Slovic & Fischhoff, 1977; Wood, 1979) have demonstrated many times, our recollection of what outcomes we would have expected from some experiment or historical situation is instantly distorted once we know what really did happen.

When people are told the outcome of an experiment, the outcome suddenly seems less surprising to them than it is to people who are simply told about the experimental procedure and its possible outcomes. In one of Fischhoff’s experiments, Israeli students estimated the likelihood of various possible outcomes of President Richard Nixon’s forthcoming trips to Peking and Moscow (Fischhoff & Beyth, 1975). When, after his visits, the students were asked unexpectedly to remember their predictions, they mistakenly remembered them as coinciding closely with what they now knew had happened. Finding out that something had happened made it seem more inevitable.

                Likewise, in everyday life we often do not expect something to happen until it does. We then suddenly see clearly the forces which brought it to be and thus seldom feel surprised. We say we really “knew all along that he was going to act that way.” As the Danish philosopher-theologian Soren Kierkegaard surmised, “Life is lived forwards, but understood backwards.”

                If the I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon is pervasive, you may now be feeling that you already knew about it. Indeed, almost any conceivable result of a psychological experiment can seem like common sense—after you know the result. The phenomenon can be crudely demonstrated by giving half of a group some purported psychological finding and the other half the opposite result. For example:

Social psychologists have found that, whether choosing friends or falling in love, we are most attracted to people whose traits are different from our own. There seems to be wisdom in the old saying, “Opposites attract.”

Social psychologists have found that, whether choosing friends or falling in love, we are most attracted to people whose traits are similar to our own. There seems to be wisdom in the old saying, “Birds of a feather flock together.”

It is my experience that when fifty people are given one of these findings and fifty the opposite finding and all are asked to “explain” the result and then indicate whether it is “surprising” or “not surprising,” virtually all will find whichever result they were given “not surprising.”

                As these examples indicate, we can draw upon the stockpile of ancient proverbs to make almost any result seem commonsensical. Nearly every possible outcome is conceivable, so there are proverbs for almost all occasions. Shall we say with John Donne, “No man is an island,” or with Thomas Wolfe, “Every man is an island”? Does “haste make waste” or is “he who hesitates lost”? Is “A penny saved is a penny earned” true or is it “Pennywise, pound foolish”? Of a social psychologist reports that separation intensifies romantic attraction, someone is sure to reply, “Of course, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’.” Should it turn out the reverse, the same person may remind us, “Out of sight, out of mind.” No matter what happens, there will be someone who knew it would.

                This hindsight bias creates a problem for many psychology students. When you read the results of experiments in your textbooks, the material often seems easy, even commonsensical. When you subsequently take a multiple choice test on which you must choose among several plausible outcomes to an experiment, the task may become surprisingly difficult. “I don’t know what happened,” the befuddled student later bemoans. “I thought I knew the material.”

                The I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon also affects our assessments of our knowledge. If what we learn does not surprise us, then we are inclined to overestimate how much we already knew. Consider this question (to which 1 is the correct answer): “Which is longer, (1) the Suez Canal, or (2) the Panama Canal?” What is the likelihood you could have answered this question correctly if I had not told you the answer? Fischhoff found that University of Oregon students who were not told the answers to such questions tended to rate them as toss-ups; those who had been told the correct answers thought they probably would have gotten most right.

                Now that you and I know about this tendency to overestimate our past wisdom, will we be as vulnerable to it as these Oregon students? Fischhoff (1977) wondered about this, also. He forewarned some more Oregon students that on these questions people

Exaggerate how much they have known without being told the answer. You might call this an I-knew-it-all-along effect. . . In completing the present questionnaire, please do everything you can to avoid this bias. One reason why it happens is that people who are told the correct answer find it hard to imagine how they ever could have believed in the incorrect one. In answering, make certain that you haven’t forgotten any reasons that you might have thought of in favor of the wrong answer—had you not been told it was wrong.

How much effort do you think these “debiasing instructions” had? Incredibly, they had no effect. Being fully forewarned about the hindsight bias did not reduce it at all! (Surely, though, now that you and I know the result of this experiment. . .)

                Is there no way to reduce the hindsight bias? With Paul Slovic, Fischhoff did find one way (Slovic and Fischhoff, 1977). People were told the results of several experiments. Some were then asked “Had the study worked out the other way, how would you explain it?” These people perceived the result as much less inevitable than did those who had not imagined an opposite result.

                The I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon can have pernicious social and personal consequences. It is conducive to arrogance—overestimation of our own intellectual powers and of the perceptiveness of our after-the-fact explanations. Moreover, since outcomes seem as if they should have been foreseeable, we are most likely to blame decision makers for what are, in retrospect, their “obvious” bad choices than to praise them for their good choices, since these, too, were “obvious.” Thus, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Monday-morning historians could read the signs and see the “inevitability” of what had happened. Likewise, we sometimes chastise ourselves for our “stupid mistakes”—for not having better handled a situation or a person, for example. Looking back now, we see how we obviously should have handled it. But sometimes we are too hard on ourselves. We forget that what is now obvious to us was not nearly so obvious at the time.

                The conclusion to be drawn is not that common sense is usually wrong. My hunch is that most conventional wisdom likely does apply—under certain conditions. After all, both amateur and professional social psychologists observe and form theories about the same human nature. The point is that our common sense is often after the fact—it describes events more easily than it predicts them—and we therefore easily deceive ourselves into thinking that we know and knew more than we do and did.

                We have seen what social psychology is, how its research is done, and how it differs from common sense. There is but one other matter to which we should be sensitized before embarking on our journey into the discipline.

(Source: Myers, David G. 1983. Social Psychology. United States of America: McGraw-Hill, Inc.)

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