magnt

You’ve probably heard the saying hindsight is 20/20. Everything seems to get crystal clear as you look back on your life and see all of the mistakes you made. Why did you sell when you should have bought? Why did you go left when it’s so clear you should have gone right. How could you have been such an idiot? Those were such glaring mistakes. Or were they?

Scientists have figured out something called hindsight bias which it turns out massively influences our perspective of past events. What happens is that we look back on past events with the information we have now, not realizing that we didn’t have that knowledge then. This makes us feel like past events were more predictable and clear cut than they actually were. Sometimes what we call a mistake was simply a wrong decision. Even if you could do it over again you’d probably mess it up because armed with the information you had at that time it seemed right.

We need to ease up on the self of yesterday and cast a skeptical eye at ourselves today. He’s not as dumb as he seemed.

Photo Credit: lintmachine