title: Shared visual attention reduces hindsight bias.
abstract: Hindsight bias is the tendency to retrospectively think of outcomes as being more foreseeable than they actually were. It is a robust judgment bias and is difficult to correct (or "debias"). In the experiments reported here, we used a visual paradigm in which performers decided whether blurred photos contained humans. Evaluators, who saw the photos unblurred and thus knew whether a human was present, estimated the proportion of participants who guessed whether a human was present. The evaluators exhibited visual hindsight bias in a way that matched earlier data from judgments of historical events surprisingly closely. Using eye tracking, we showed that a higher correlation between the gaze patterns of performers and evaluators (shared attention) is associated with lower hindsight bias. This association was validated by a causal method for debiasing: Showing the gaze patterns of the performers to the evaluators as they viewed the stimuli reduced the extent of hindsight bias.
authors.affiliation: Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena 91125, USA. daw-an@caltech.edu
authors.forename: Daw-An
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Shinsuke
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Shimojo
authors.forename: Stephanie W
authors.initials: SW
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Colin F
authors.initials: CF
authors.lastname: Camerer
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D053483:Eye Movement Measurements; D005133:Eye Movements / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D007600:Judgment / Q000502:physiology*; D060865:Repetition Priming / Q000502:physiology*; D056345:Theory of Mind / Q000502:physiology*; D014796:Visual Perception / Q000502:physiology*