Consider-the-Opposite

Consider-the-Opposite

Reviewed by Faisal Zaidi

A way of reducing a bias by asking how a different outcome or cause could have come about.

What it is

Roese and Vohs name it as the most consistently effective method for reducing hindsight bias. Sanna, Schwarz and Stocker found that the amount matters: listing a few alternative outcomes felt easy and produced no significant hindsight effect, while listing many felt difficult and increased the bias, because the difficulty itself was read as a sign that the actual outcome was inevitable.

In effect

In the article on hindsight bias, it is the practical step that holds up, provided it stays small.

What it does not say

It does not say that more alternatives are always better; in the 2002 studies, a long list made the bias worse.

Sources

  1. Roese, N. J., & Vohs, K. D. (2012). Hindsight bias. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(5), 411-426.
  2. Sanna, L. J., Schwarz, N., & Stocker, S. L. (2002). When debiasing backfires: Accessible content and accessibility experiences in debiasing hindsight. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 28(3), 497-502.