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Hindsight Biases01:12

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Hindsight bias leads you to believe that the event you just experienced was predictable, even though it really wasn’t. In other words, you knew all along that things would turn out the way they did. Can you relate this to the phrase "Hindsight is 20/20" now? 
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Regression toward the mean (“RTM”) is a phenomenon in which extremely high or low values—for example, and individual’s blood pressure at a particular moment—appear closer to a group’s average upon remeasuring. Although this statistical peculiarity is the result of random error and chance, it has been problematic across various medical, scientific, financial and psychological applications. In particular, RTM, if not taken into account, can interfere when...
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Updated: Sep 9, 2025

A Prediction Error-driven Retrieval Procedure for Destabilizing and Rewriting Maladaptive Reward Memories in Hazardous Drinkers
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People calibrate future expectations to past performance when predicting transparently random events.

Russell Roberts1, Reid Hastie1, Alexander Todorov1

  • 1Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL 60637, USA.

PNAS Nexus
|August 28, 2025
PubMed
Summary

People tend to see patterns in random events, influencing their future expectations and risk-taking. Even with random coin tosses, success breeds optimism and risk-taking, while failure leads to pessimism and risk aversion.

Keywords:
luckpredictionrandomnessrationalityrisk

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Psychology
  • Behavioral Economics
  • Decision Science

Background:

  • Humans often struggle to distinguish random from patterned sequences.
  • Belief in personal control can persist even in genuinely random situations.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To investigate how performance feedback from a random process influences future expectations and risk-taking.
  • To examine the psychological mechanisms underlying the perception of control over random outcomes.

Main Methods:

  • Five experiments involving over 12,000 participants predicting outcomes of fair coin tosses.
  • Participants received varying numbers of "successes" (correct predictions) without deception.
  • Analysis of prediction behavior, future expectations, and risk-taking propensity.

Main Results:

  • Higher success rates in predicting random coin tosses led to more optimistic future expectations and increased risk-taking.
  • Lower success rates resulted in pessimistic expectations and risk-averse behavior.
  • The strength of performance inference correlated with participants' tendency to change predictions, suggesting perceived spurious correlations.

Conclusions:

  • Individuals exhibit a strong tendency to infer predictive signals from performance in random sequences, even without evidence.
  • This inference is not explained by distorted probability beliefs or risk attitudes but by detecting illusory correlations.
  • Findings highlight a fundamental human bias in interpreting random events and its impact on decision-making.