Judgment and Decision Making

5

AN EARLY HISTORY OF HINDSIGHT RESEARCH

Baruch Fischhoff

CARNEGIE MELLON UNIVERSITY

The first studies of hindsight bias reflected the confluence of two desires. One arose from being part of the heady early days of Amos Tversky and Danny Kahneman’s heuristics-and-biases research program. As the paradigm evolved, the challenge for the participating graduate students was to find a heuristic to call one’s own or to find a way to elaborate one of the three “classics” (availability, representativeness, anchoring and adjustment). Maya Bar Hillel and Ruth Beyth-Marom chose the latter route. However, I was still struggling to reconcile the political motives that had brought me to Israel, planning to live in a kibbutz for the rest of my life, with academic ...