Question

You give a person the results from a social psychological study and she says that she knew it would come out that way. This is an example of

a. a self-fulfilling expectation
b. the hindsight bias
c. unobtrusive expectations
d. a confounded experiment
e. none of the above

Answer 1

The instance of a person claiming they anticipated the results of a study post-outcome represents an example of the hindsight bias, where an individual believes an event was predictable after it has occurred.

Step-by-step explanation:

The student's observation that she knew the study's outcome beforehand is an example of the hindsight bias. This bias is the tendency to see events that have already occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place. It is a common cognitive bias where people believe after the fact that an event was more predictable than it actually was, often stated as "I knew it all along." This belief can lead to an overestimation of one's own ability to have predicted an event before it happened.

Hindsight bias occurs when people are presented with the outcome of an uncertain event and feel that they would have predicted the actual outcome. This is different from a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is when a belief leads to its own fulfillment. In contrast, hindsight bias does not influence the outcome but biases the perception after the outcome is known.