PSYC 1101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Hindsight Bias, Barnum Effect, Confirmation Bias
10 Jun 2018
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Remember: Psychological is empirical
● 4 Basic Goals of Psychology
○ Describe
○ Explain
○ Predict
○ Control
Problem: there are hurdles that often skew our logic and affect our research
● Hindsight bias
● Overconfidence
● The Barnum Effect (aka: Confirmation Bias)
● The Hawthorne Effect
Hindsight Bias
● The tendency to believe after learning the outcome of an event that you knew it all along
● Example: Monday morning quarterbacking
○ After a big game people will rationalize how they knew a team was going to lose
and how they should have improved
● Occurs because once we find out something has happened, it seems inevitable that it
could have been the only outcome
Overconfidence
● Leads us to estimate our intuition and basically causes us to think we know more than we
really do
● Examples:
○ overestimating the stock market before playing it
○ Overestimating your ability to predict the weather forecast
The Barnum Effect
● AKA Confirmation bias
● The tendency for people to accept into that confirms what they want believe
● Examples:
○ Horoscopes, fortune tellers, some personality tests
○ Fueled by vague information that we want to hear
The Hawthorne Effect
● The tendency of some people to work harder and perform better when they are
participants in an experiment
● Individuals may change their behavior due to the attention they are receiving from
researchers rather than because of any manipulation of independent variables
find more resources at oneclass.com
find more resources at oneclass.com
Document Summary
Problem: there are hurdles that often skew our logic and affect our research. The tendency to believe after learning the outcome of an event that you knew it all along. After a big game people will rationalize how they knew a team was going to lose and how they should have improved. Occurs because once we find out something has happened, it seems inevitable that it could have been the only outcome. Leads us to estimate our intuition and basically causes us to think we know more than we really do. Overestimating the stock market before playing it. Overestimating your ability to predict the weather forecast. The tendency for people to accept into that confirms what they want believe. Fueled by vague information that we want to hear. The tendency of some people to work harder and perform better when they are participants in an experiment.
