Being Wise After the Event Depends on the Mindset: How Construal Level Modifies Reconstruction in the Hindsight Bias Effect

Hindsight bias occurs when, due to feedback about the outcome of an event or receiving a correct answer to a question, individuals recall their original judgments modified following the learned outcome. This article presents two experiments in which we attempted to explore the influence of construal levels on the magnitude of the hindsight bias effect. Construal level (CL), also known as psychological distance, defines a state of mind, in which people either feel close (low CL) or distant (high CL) to an object or an event. In the first experiment, participants received a list of true and false statements and assessed the probability of them being true. Then, just before the second judgment of these statements took place in the presence or absence of feedback information, a low versus high CL state was induced using a temporal perspective. The second experiment was a conceptual replication of the first using different materials, which consisted of questions from various areas of knowledge. In Experiment 1, analyses using the Hindsight Bias Difference Score multinomial model revealed that participants in the low CL state condition were more susceptible to a biased reconstruction regarding the direction of the “false” outcome than in the high construal-level state. In Experiment 2, analyses using the HB13 multinomial model revealed that participants in the low CL state condition were more susceptible to source confusion in bias reconstruction and were characterized by lower correct recollections for items without feedback.