Concept · Decision-Making Mental Models
Hindsight Bias
Origin: Baruch Fischhoff
Biological Parallel
The KT extinction 66 million years ago now seems inevitable—of course a meteor would doom the dinosaurs. But for 170 million years, dinosaurs dominated every terrestrial ecosystem; mammals were marginal. Hindsight makes the outcome look predetermined, erasing the contingency. Evolution has no foresight, only retrospection: traits that succeeded look adaptive in hindsight, but most mutations fail. We construct just-so stories explaining why the giraffe's neck elongated while forgetting the thousands of failed neck experiments fossilized in rock.