Hindsight bias: motivational explanations
Motivational explanations suggest that judgement and decision processes are not only
affected by rational cognitions. They are also influenced by actual needs and motives,
including need for control, need for cognition, self-relevance and,
most importantly self-presentation concerns.
In the latter approach, people are motivated to make others
believe that their predictions were close to the actual outcome, in an attempt to
maintain a high level of public self-esteem. Contrary to the memory impairment
hypothesis, this explanation interprets hindsight distortions as adjustments during
the response generation state. Several authors showed, that empirical evidence for
motivational underpinnings of the knew-it-all-along effect is rather weak.
Return to:
theoretical explanations
Literature:
Campbell & Tesser (1983),
Hawkins & Hastie (1990)
