Citation

Dekker SWA. Hum. Factors Aerosp. Safety 2004; 4(2): 87-99.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2004, Ashgate Publishing)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The hindsight bias is seen as a large obstacle to learning from incidents. Almost all explanations of the hindsight bias focus on how it distorts historical explanation. But perhaps the hindsight bias is not about history and not a bias. It may rather be about controlling the future. The almost inevitable urge to highlight and oversimplify past choice moments (where people went the wrong way), the drive to identify 'errors', is forward looking, not backward looking. The hindsight bias may represent an oversimplification of history that primes us for complex futures and allows us to project simple models of past lessons onto those futures, lest history repeats itself. This means that for making progress on safety and learning from incidents, people's retrospective reconstruction, and the hindsight bias, should not be seen and combated as the primary phenomenon.