CURSE: Knowledge and Hindsight Bias

By Staff Reporters

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Similar to the availability heuristic (Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) and to some extent, the false consensus effect, once you really understand a new piece of information, that piece of information is now available to you and often becomes seemingly obvious. It might be easy to forget that there was ever a time you didn’t know this information and so, you assume that others, like yourself, also know this information: ie., the curse of knowledge.

However, it is often an unfair assumption that others share the same knowledge.

And so, the hindsight bias is similar to the curse of knowledge in that once we have information about an event, it then seems obvious that it was going to happen all along.

IOW: I should have seen it coming!

COMMENTS APPRECIATED

Thank You

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