Situation 1: Your friend is upset because her boyfriend just broke up with her for someone else.
Your response: "I knew from the beginning that he was no good."
Situation 2: You are watching football with your friends and the Vikings lose.
Your response: "Well I saw that one coming before the game even started..."
We for some reason as humans acquire a sense of satisfaction in the feeling that we're always right. Some may even say borderline cocky at times. This "I knew it all along" mentality is key representation of hindsight bias, which is our tendency to believe that our predictions of results for events, that have already occurred, are correct. The outcome is already known and out there, of course your "prediction" will be correct. But if we are aware of this, why are we all so guilty of this cognitive bias?
Another cognitive bias is overconfidence, another item we have all fallen guilty to. You know when you walk out post-exam thinking "yeah, I ROCKED that test!" Then you get your score back and you totally tanked it. This my friends is a prime example of overconfidence, which is our tendency to overestimate our forecast of events. Generally, we make predictions towards a more positive or "above-average" outcome, yet again another excuse to allow ourselves to be cocky. We feel as if we can beat the odds, take on the world, and get away with anything. But there is a difference between ambition and plain stupidity, its our job try to (hopefully) choose the right path.
I personally found these two items as the most interesting concepts from Chapter 2, mostly due to the fact that we have all committed the acts of hindsight bias and overconfidence. If we "knew it all along" or are "confident in our decisions" wouldn't we be able to prevent fallouts from occurring? We are instead at times blinded by our desire to be right that unfortunately hinder our ability to make good judgements. It's a habit that has us draw misleading conclusions, and sometimes set us up for disappointment. So if this is the case, why do we do it so often?
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