Hindsight Bias

This bias, also known as the “knew-it-all-along effect”, comes up frequently when people review past events. Hindsight bias is the belief that past events were more predictable than they actually were.

This comes up all the time in incident investigations and Post-incident reviews. Unless carefully moderated, people are prone to judge other people’s actions (typically those who caused the incident) as bad or “stupid”, believing they overlooked obvious information at the time of the event that would have let them see it coming.