The Uncertainty Illusion

You name the year, I'll find the fear

Regular readers will know I’m a touch obsessed with hindsight bias.

If you’re not familiar with hindsight bias, let me illustrate with a question: Prior to the 2020 presidential election, how likely did you think it was that Joe Biden would defeat Donald Trump? Simple, right? You merely have to recall how you felt at that time. There’s no way you could get this question wrong.

And yet, people routinely get questions like these wrong.

You know Joe Biden beat Donald Trump. (I’m confident that those who doubt that are not readers of mine.) As a result, you remember yourself thinking that Joe Biden’s chances were greater than you actually thought at the time.

It works in the other direction, too. If Biden had lost, you would remember yourself thinking a loss was more likely than you actually thought then.

That’s hindsight bias. Once we know how the movie ends, the movie’s ending feels more predictable than it really was.

You may be thinking this effect won’t happen if you force yourself to be more precise about your expectations, so instead of saying, “I think there’s a good chance Biden is going to win,” you say, “I think there is a seventy-five percent chance Biden will win.” That’s a fixed number. An anchor. Surely your memory can’t budge that! But in Philip Tetlock’s seminal research on expert political judgment, he asked experts to make forecasts with numbers — and still found substantial hindsight bias. (My favourite illustration involved the fall of the Soviet Union. The research was on-going in the later Gorbachev years and Phil had the prescience to ask if the Communist party would lose its monopoly on power. When the Soviet Union crumbled, Phil went back to the experts and asked them to recall what they had answered. The results were heavily skewed. Some experts who basically dismissed the possibility flatly remembered themselves having seen it coming. This is why psychologists sometimes call hindsight bias the I-knew-it-all-along effect.)

I obsess about hindsight bias because I think it is much more than a mere psychological quirk

“Dad, how do you spell ‘thermonuclear’?”

Hindsight bias makes the past look more predictable than it was. Or to put that another way, it makes the past appear less uncertain than it was. Uncertainty is so unsettling that it can actually be more disturbing to believe that something bad may happen than to be certain it will (as all good horror movie directors know). By making the past appear less uncertain than it really was, hindsight bias makes the past look less frightening.

That means our perception of history is profoundly and routinely biased. Which is not good. But that’s far from all the damage done by hindsight bias.

We naturally tend to judge by comparison. So when we look around at the present, and we see scary things that may or may not go horribly wrong — that damned uncertainty! — and we want to judge how bad the situation is, we will look for points of comparison. We find them in the past. But our perception of the past is skewed, making it look less uncertain and scary than it was, so when we compare that falsely perceived past with the present, it makes the present look even more uncertain and scary.

I call this the uncertainty illusion. If I’m right, it has big implications for our perceptions and judgments.

To illustrate the power of this illusion, I have a standard shtick.

I mention some years in the past which I know people in my audience are likely to feel were “good years.” Peace and prosperity. No worries. Then I show some headlines from those years — headlines riddled with uncertainty and fear.

But it’s easy to shoot targets when you get to pick what you shoot.

So let’s make this harder.

I want you to pick a single year — any year in the last, say, 150 — that you think was a standout year, a year blessed with peace and prosperity, the sort of year that old people would call “the good old days.” And no, I won’t go looking for horrible things happening in far away lands that you didn’t have in mind: Let’s keep this focused on the United States, Canada, and Britain.

You name the golden year. I’ll dig around the archives and share headlines.

Leave your answers below and let’s have some scary fun.