Hindsight/Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment Under Uncertainty

Abstract

One major difference between historical and non-historical judgment is that the historical judge typically knows how things turned out. In Experiment 1, receipt of such outcome knowledge was found to increase the postdicted likelihood of reported events and change the perceived relevance of event-descriptive data, regardless of the likelihood of the outcome and the truth of the report. Judges were, however, largely unaware of the effect that outcome knowledge had on their perceptions. As a result, they overestimated what they would have known without outcome knowledge (Experiment 2), as well as what others (Experiment 3) actually did know without outcome knowledge. It is argued that this lack of awareness can seriously restrict one's ability to judge or learn from the past.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Apr 07, 1975
Accession Number
ADA008580

Entities

People

  • Baruch Fischhoff

Organizations

  • Oregon Research Institute

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Human Systems

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Commerce
  • Experimental Design
  • Hypotheses
  • Information Processing
  • Instructions
  • Judgment
  • Military Research
  • New York
  • Perception
  • Probability
  • Psychology
  • Questionnaires
  • Second World War
  • Social Psychology
  • Social Sciences
  • Statistics
  • Students

Readers

  • Government Contracting/Procurement.
  • Team-Based Human-Centered Cognitive Task Decision Making and Information Performance.