![]() ![]() An intermediate ‘inevitability’ level involves beliefs about the state of the world and the predetermination of events (e.g., “Under the circumstances, no different outcome was possible”). At the bottom level sits memory distortion, which causes earlier judgements to be misremembered. ![]() A man who was bullied at work states, “I should never have taken the job – I should have stayed where I was”.īasic psychological research (e.g., Nestler et al., 2010) suggests that there are three kinds of hindsight bias, which Roese and Vohs (2012) conceptualize as a hierarchy. ![]() A woman whose husband subjected her to domestic violence asserts that, “I knew I shouldn’t have married him. ![]() If I had done something about it my child would have survived”. A parent whose child died from a rare infection, and who (at the time) had no reason to suspect that their symptoms were anything other than a sore throat, says, “I knew something was wrong that day.An individual who was on a train that was attacked by suicide bombers states, “I knew I should have got on a different train that morning, I had a funny feeling about it.”.People experiencing hindsight bias “think that they should have known something, or did know something, that would have led them to act differently had they paid more attention to it” (Young et al., 2021). In other words, people often have a tendency to conflate an outcome with what they knew at the time. Once an outcome is known, people with this bias are likely to believe that they predicted (or could have predicted) an outcome that they did not (or could not) predict (Fischhoff, 1975). Hindsight bias is sometimes referred to as the “knew-it-all-along” effect. Once biases have been identified, clients can be taught to appraise the accuracy of these automatic thoughts and draw new conclusions. Identifying the presence and nature of cognitive biases is often a helpful way of introducing this concept – clients are usually quick to appreciate and identify with the concept of ‘unhelpful thinking styles’, and can easily be trained to notice the presence of biases in their own automatic thoughts. For example, catastrophizing is associated with anxiety disorders (Nöel et al, 2012), dichotomous thinking has been linked to emotional instability (Veen & Arntz, 2000), and thought-action fusion is associated with obsessive compulsive disorder (Shafran et al, 1996).Ĭatching automatic thoughts and (re)appraising them is a core component of traditional cognitive therapy (Beck et al, 1979 Beck, 1995 Kennerley, Kirk, Westbrook, 2007). These biases are often maintained by characteristic unhelpful assumptions (Beck et al., 1979).ĭifferent cognitive biases are associated with different clinical presentations. Sometimes we might jump to the worst possible conclusion (“this rough patch of skin is cancer!”), at other times we might blame ourselves for things that are not our fault (“If I hadn’t made him mad he wouldn’t have hit me”), and at other times we might rely on intuition and jump to conclusions (“I know that they all hate me even though they’re being nice”). Different cognitive short cuts result in different kinds of bias or distortions in our thinking. Sometimes our brains take ‘shortcuts’ and we think things that are not completely accurate. We are always interpreting the world around us, trying to make sense of what is happening. A brief introduction to cognitive distortionsĬognitive distortions, cognitive biases, or ‘unhelpful thinking styles’ are the characteristic ways our thoughts become biased (Beck, 1963). ![]()
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