The economy, “super PAC” money, debate performances, the candidates’ personalities. Roll it all together, and it’s obvious who’s going to win.
Or, uh, it will be.
Amid the many uncertainties of next Tuesday’s presidential election lies one sure thing: Many people will feel in their gut that they knew the result all along. Not only felt it coming, but swear they predicted it beforehand — remember? — and probably more than once.
These analysts won’t be hard to find. They will most likely include (in addition to news media pundits) neighbors, friends, co-workers and relatives, as well as the person whose reflection appears in the glare of the laptop screen. Most will also have a ready-made argument for why it was inevitable that Mitt Romney, or Barack Obama, won — displaying the sort of false, after-the-fact “foresight” that psychologists call hindsight bias.
“The important thing to know about hindsight bias is that it not only changes how you see the world, but also how you see yourself in it,” said Neal Roese, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, who just published a review paper on the bias with Kathleen D. Vohs of the University of Minnesota. “You begin to think: ‘Hey, I’m good. I’m really good at figuring out what’s going to happen.’ You begin to see outcomes as inevitable that were not.”
Long the province of political scientists, historians and pollsters, voters’ behavior has more recently attracted the attention of psychologists. They have dug into the field over the past decade or so, finding a wide-open arena in which to test results from lab studies and in some cases drawing interest from campaign strategists. If politics is individual psychology writ large, then thinking about politics should be subject to the same shortfalls and quirks as thinking about anything else. And so it is, to some extent — presenting some of the same opportunities for self-correction.
The most obvious carry-over to politics is confirmation bias, the reflexive instinct to begin with an assumption — say, that poor people are lazy — and notice only evidence that’s supportive, like malingering, ignoring the efforts of the rest of the $5-an-hour night cleaning crew.
Hindsight bias is close to the reverse. People retrofit their opinions and judgments to the evidence, in this case to an election result, but just as often to a political decision (or nondecision) that went wrong. Of course it was clear that Saddam Hussein was bluffing about weapons of mass destruction. Anyone could have seen that. Of course the consulate in Benghazi needed beefed-up security.
Campaigns exploit this instinct, particularly when appealing to voters who second-guess decisions of someone they put in office, said Mark McKinnon, a former adviser to President George W. Bush and co-founder of No Labels, a nonprofit devoted to bipartisanship. “As the challenger, you need to win over some of those voters,” Mr. McKinnon said in an e-mail. “You need to give them an out for their ‘voters’ remorse.’ It’s not them, you see, it was him.”
Once they know an outcome, people tend to inflate their initial predictions by an average of 15 to 20 percent, Dr. Roese said — ample wiggle room to retrospectively alter almost any prediction from “it’s going to happen” to “it probably won’t,” be it a tennis match, a legal decision or a presidential race.
In 800 studies during the past few decades, researchers have demonstrated the effect consistently in predicting everything from legal decisions and stock movements to sports contests and world affairs.
In an experiment conducted during the Clinton administration, for instance, two psychologists at Loyola University in Chicago had 34 students predict the likelihood that the president would be convicted in his impeachment trial. The students’ estimates ranged from about 50 percent 11 days before the decision to about 41 percent a few days before, as the news media were trending toward acquittal.
But 11 days after the Senate voted to acquit the president, the study found, the same students inflated their original estimates by about 10 percentage points. Their estimates of what a friend would have guessed showed no such inflation. The students identified themselves mostly as independents, with equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats.
An experiment led by the one of the same Loyola researchers, Fred B. Bryant, found a similar pattern in students estimating the likelihood that O. J. Simpson would be acquitted in his murder trial. In both studies, participants remembered their initial predictions as more accurate when judged more than a week after the fact than in the first few days after.
“Even after it has been explained to you 100 times, you can still fall prey” to the bias, said Philip E. Tetlock, a professor of management at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. “Indeed, even after you’ve written about it 100 times.”
Mind: He Won the Election? I Knew It All Along
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Mind: He Won the Election? I Knew It All Along
