Hindsight bias and causal attribution: A causal model theory of creeping determinism

Social Psychology

Volumn 39, Issue 3, 2008, Pages 182-188

  Nestler, Steffen ^a   Blank, Hartmut ^b   Von Collani, Gernot ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF LEIPZIG   (Germany)

^b UNIVERSITY OF PORTSMOUTH   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Causal attribution; Conjunction effect; Creeping determinism; Hindsight bias

Indexed keywords

EID: 49849095381     PISSN: 18649335     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1027/1864-9335.39.3.182     Document Type: Article

References (44)

1. Abelson, R.P, Leddo, J., & Gross, P.H. (1987). The strength of conjunctive explanations. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 13, 141-155.
2. Agans, R.P., & Shaffer, L.S. (1994). The hindsight bias: The role of the availability heuristic and perceived risk. Basic and Applied Social Psychology, 15, 439-449.
3. Ahn, W., & Bailenson, J. (1996). Causal attribution as a search for underlying mechanisms: An explanation of the conjunction fallacy and the discounting principle. Cognitive Psychology, 31, 82-123.
4. Ahn, W., Kalish, C.W., Medin, D.L., & Gelman, S.A. (1995). The role of covariation versus mechanism information in causal attribution. Cognition, 54, 299-352.
5. Anderson, C.A. (1991). Attributions as decisions: A two-stage information processing model. In Seymour, L.Z. (Ed.), New model and extensions of attribution theory: The third Attribution-Personality Theory Conference. New York: Springer.
6. Blank, H., Musch, J., & Pohl, R.F. (2007). Hindsight bias: On being wise after the event. Social Cognition, 25, 1-9.
7. Blank, H., & Nestler, S. (2006). Perceiving events as both inevitable and unforeseeable in hindsight: The Leipzig candidacy for the Olympics. British Journal of Social Psychology, 45, 149-160.
8. Blank, H., & Nestler, S. (2007). Cognitive process models of the hindsight bias. Social Cognition, 25, 132-146.
9. Blank, H., Nestler, S., von Collani, G., & Fischer, V. (2008). How many hindsight biases are there? Cognition, 106 1408-1440.
10. Carli, L.L. (1999). Cognitive reconstruction, hindsight, and reactions to victims and perpetrators. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 966-979.
11. Cheng, P.W., & Novick, L.R. (1990). A probabilistic contrast model of causal induction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 545-567.
12. Cheng, P.W., & Novick, L.R. (1992). Covariation in natural causal induction. Psychological Review, 99, 365-382.
13. Enzle, M.E., & Schopflocher, D. (1978). Instigation of attribution processes by attributional questions. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 4, 595-599.
14. Fischhoff, B. (1975). Hindsight? Foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1, 288-299.
15. Hastie, R., Schkade, D.A., & Payne, J.W. (1999). Juror judgments in civil cases: Hindsight effects on judgments of liability for punitive damages. Law and Human Behavior, 23, 597-613.
16. Hawkins, S.A., & Hastie, R. (1990). Hindsight: Biased judgments of past events after the outcomes are known. Psychological Bulletin, 107, 311-327.
17. Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.
18. Hilton, D.J. (1990). Conversational processes and causal explanation. Psychological Bulletin, 107, 65-81.
19. Hilton, D.J., & Erb, H.P. (1996). Mental models and causal explanation: Judgments of probable cause and explanatory relevance. Thinking and Reasoning, 2, 273-308.
20. Jaspars, J., & Hewstone, M. (1987). Covariation and causal attribution: A logical model of the intuitive analysis of variance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 663-672.
21. Kelley, H.H. (1967). Attribution theory in social psychology. In Levine, D. (Ed.), Nebraska Symposium on Motivation (Vol. 15, pp. 129-238). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
22. Kelley, H.H. (1973). The process of causal attribution. American Psychologist, 28, 107-128.
23. Leddo, J., Abelson, R.P., & Gross, PH. (1984). Conjunctive explanations: When two reasons are better than one. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 933-943.
24. Louie, T.A. (2005). Hindsight bias and outcome-consistent thoughts when observing and making service-provider decisions. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 98, 88-95.
25. Malle, B. (2004). How the mind explains behavior: Folk explanations, meaning, and social interaction. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
26. Mark, M.M., & Mellor, S. (1991). Effect of self-relevance of an event on hindsight bias: The foreseeability of a layoff. Journal of Applied Psychology, 76, 569-577.
27. McClure, J. (2002). Goal-based explanations of actions and outcomes. European Review of Social Psychology, 12, 201-235.
28. McClure, J., Lalljee, M., Jaspars, J., & Abelson, R.P (1989). Conjunctive explanations of success and failure: The effect of different types of causes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 19-26.
29. Mill, J.S. (1843). A system of logic ratiocinative and inductive. New York: Longman.
30. Nario, M.R., & Branscombe, N.R. (1995). Comparison processes in hindsight and causal attribution. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 1244-1255.
31. Nestler, S. (2007a). Creeping determinism and causal models: About the influence of processing load on the magnitude of the hindsight bias. Unpublished dissertation, University of Leipzig.
32. Nestler, S. (2007b). Unpublished data. University of Leipzig.
33. Nestler, S., Blank, H., & von Collani, G. (2008). Hindsight bias doesn't always come easy: Causal models, cognitive effort, and creeping determinism. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
34. Nestler, S., & von Collani, G. (in press). Hindsight bias, conjunctive explanations, and causal attribution. Social Cognition.
35. Nestler, S., & von Collani, G. (2008). Hindsight bias and the activation of counterfactual mind-sets. Experimental Psychology, 55, 342-349.
36. Pezzo, M.V. (2003). Surprise, defence, or making sense: What removes the hindsight bias? Memory, 11, 421-441.
37. Pohl, R.F., Eisenhauer, M., & Hardt, O. (2003). SARA: A cognitive process model to simulate the anchoring effect and hindsight bias. Memory, 11, 337-356.
38. Roese, N.J., & Maniar, S.D. (1997). Perceptions of purple: Counterfactual and hindsight judgments at Northwestern Wildcats football games. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23, 1245-1253.
39. Roese, N.J., & Morris, M.W. (1999). Impression valence constrains social explanations: The case of discounting versus conjunction effects. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 437-448.
40. Roese, N.J., & Olson, J.M. (1996). Counterfactuals, causal attributions, and the hindsight bias: A conceptual integration. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 32, 197-227.
41. Schkade, D.A., & Rilbourne, L.M. (1991). Expectation-outcome consistency and hindsight bias. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 49, 105-123.
42. Slovic, P., & Fischhoff, B. (1977). On the psychology of experimental surprises. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 3, 544-551.
43. Wasserman, D., Lempert, R.O., & Hastie, R. (1991). Hindsight and causality. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 30-35.
44. Weiner, B. (1985). Spontaneous causal thinking. Psychological Bulletin, 97(1), 74-84.