Question

You are planning a trip with friends and think "someone is going to forget something important." When you get to your destination and find out that someone did forget something and you say "I knew it," this is an example of

a) Hindsight bias
b) Confirmation bias
c) Availability heuristic
d) Overconfidence

Answer 1

The scenario where the person says "I knew it" after their prediction about forgetting something on a trip comes true is an example of hindsight bias. This bias involves mistakenly believing we could have predicted an event once it has occurred. The direct answer to the student's question is a) Hindsight bias.

Step-by-step explanation:

Hindsight bias refers to the phenomenon where we believe after an event has occurred that we could have predicted the outcome beforehand. In the scenario provided, after planning a trip and thinking that someone might forget something, and subsequently upon discovering that someone did indeed forget, claiming "I knew it" is an illustration of hindsight bias.

The individual did not know for certain that someone would forget an item, but after the event, feels that it was predictable and thus overestimates their ability to have foreseen the event.

This cognitive bias involves a distorted ability to accurately recall our predictions about an outcome once we know what the outcome is, making it seem that we were more confident in the prediction than we actually were before knowing the result.