CAS PS 261 Lecture 5: Social Psychology Class 5
5 Mar 2018
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Document Summary
It is trivial because it documents the obvious. It is dangerous because its findings could be used to manipulate people: one problem with common sense is that we invoke it after we know the fact . In everyday life we often do not expect something to happen until it does. Then we suddenly see clearly the forces that brought the event about and feel unsurprised: hindsight bias, the tendency to exaggerate, after learning an outcome, one"s ability to have foreseen how something turned out. Also known as the i-knew-it-all-along- phenomenon: errors in judging the future"s foreseeability and in remembering our past combine to create hindsight, ex. When we read the results of an experiment in our textbooks, the material seems easy and obvious. Starting after the 9/11 terror attack and working backward, signals pointing to the impending disaster seemed obvious: what seems clear in hindsight is seldom clear on the front side of history.
