The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment: Hindsight bias among historians

Assuming the specificity of cognitive activity of historians facing a typical historical narration, a salient manifestation of the hindsight bias was expected. The results obtained indicate that advanced students of history were susceptible to this cognitive bias, crippling the historical thinking, when they were participating in a replication of Baruch Fischhoff's research (1975, first experiment) that was about the estimations of probability of alternative endings occurrence to the British-Gurkha war. But among the student non-historians, however, who were engaged in the same task and facing the same stimulus material, the hindsight effect was present as well. When in the second experiment the history students were estimating the probability of the occurrence of alternative endings of a presented clinical case study story, thus dealing with material that they have little to do with on a daily basis, this bias was present to a smaller extent. Therefore the historical materials seem to facilitate hindsight effect regardless of who estimates the probability of events. The interpretation of these results is harks back to creeping determinism and the biased reconstruction approach.