The "I Knew It All Along" Phenomenon

This week we focused on an introduction to psychology. We went through some of the history of psychology and how the definition of psychology changed throughout the years. We talked about the mind-body debate which centers around the question of whether the body and mind are separate or connected. Socrates and Plato are both dualists, which mean they believe that the mind and body are separate entities so even when the body dies, the mind can continue. Aristotle, however, despite being a student of Plato's, is a monist, meaning he believes that the mind and the body are the same. We talked about Locke's idea of man being born as a clean slate and Bacon's idea of scientific theory. We went through different types of psychologists from personality psychologists to industrial-organizational psychologists. My favorite idea that we discussed this week, however, was hindsight bias mixed with overconfidence. Mrs. Perl explained hindsight bias as the "I knew it all along" phenomenon which is a pretty accurate description when you think about it. Hindsight bias is basically the idea of people thinking that they have predicted a certain outcome accurately after finding out the true outcome of a situation. Overconfidence is the belief that our opinion, thoughts, and opinions are correct. When you put these two concepts together, we are able to conclude that in general, we tend to think that we are correct more often than we actually are.

I remember learning this term over the summer when I was doing the summer work and thinking about how often this occurs in our daily life. This term actually is what made me so interested to learn about psychology. At first when thinking about psychology it sounds like an abstract kind of science about the mind and all these "out there" concepts that would be hard to understand. After reading about the concept of hindsight bias I realized that psychology was more about the "why we do what we do" in the daily lives of humans. Sometime after learning about hindsight bias and overconfidence, I attended Bridge Builders which is basically a program in which you do activities/challenges that teach you about leadership and teamwork while working with a diverse group of peers. At the end of each activity, the group has a discussion about what they think went well, what could have been better, and their overall thoughts about the activity/challenge. At each discussion there would be at least one person, if not ten who would say something like, "It was clearly not going to work because no one was listening to each other and someone was trying to take over...bla bla bla.." Every time this happened I wanted to say, "Hindsight bias!" like we do during classes when these types of situations occur. Of course I didn't though, because then I'd have to explain what it was and I'd get that look that all white kids get during these discussions when they say something about their academic achievements or anything that sounds "too intellectual."

Basically, learning about the phenomenons of hindsight bias and overconfidence changed my outlook on psychology. Before learning about it, I had never given a second thought to it when people make these kinds of comments. Now that I know what it is I notice it all the time and marvel at how psychologists were able to notice this common theme in human behavior. I look forward to learning even more about human behavior and the little things that people do that I hadn't even noticed enough to ask questions about.