Shared Visual Attention Reduces Hindsight Bias

Daw-An Wu, Shinsuke Shimojo, Stephanie W. Wang, Colin F. Camerer

Psychological Science · 2012 · Volume 23 · Issue 12

Abstract

Hindsight bias is the tendency to retrospectively think of outcomes as being more foreseeable than they actually were. It is a robust judgment bias and is difficult to correct (or “debias”). In the experiments reported here, we used a visual paradigm in which performers decided whether blurred photos contained humans. Evaluators, who saw the photos unblurred and thus knew whether a human was present, estimated the proportion of participants who guessed whether a human was present. The evaluators exhibited visual hindsight bias in a way that matched earlier data from judgments of historical events surprisingly closely. Using eye tracking, we showed that a higher correlation between the gaze patterns of performers and evaluators (shared attention) is associated with lower hindsight bias. This association was validated by a causal method for debiasing: Showing the gaze patterns of the performers to the evaluators as they viewed the stimuli reduced the extent of hindsight bias.

Keywords

visual hindsight bias, group decision making, visual priming, heuristics, theory of mind, eye movements, attention, attribution

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