The New Coronary Pneumonia epidemic is the first to be effectively controlled in China, which undoubtedly demonstrates China ’s institutional advantages. However, under the impact of the epidemic, many problems and shortcomings were exposed. In this regard, we should conscientiously sum up the experience and lessons and profoundly reflect on the shortage. However, in this process, we must also guard against “hindsight bias”-more generally speaking, it is afterwards or afterwards. For example, many critics are good at deductions such as “what would be the result if some response measures were taken at the beginning”. This kind of deduction is “counterfactual” thinking, which is very helpful for the public to rationally view the opportunity cost behind various measures. But as a retrospective analysis, it is also easy to fall into hindsight bias.
“Life is going to live, but understanding it backwards.” 19th century Danish existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard This famous quote very profoundly predicts that hindsight deviations are stubborn and universal. Both Chinese and Western cultures have slang and proverbs that describe deviations from hindsight, which is actually the embodiment of this feature. In Chinese, there is a saying “Zhuge Liang afterwards”. Correspondingly, the English slang is “Monday morning quarterback”-this is a slang commonly used by Americans, which literally means, “Monday morning newspaper The point guard’s performance in the ball game yesterday made a “prospective” comment “, used to satirize those who put the horse behind the gun.
Although everyone knows it, both in China and the West, it ’s a matter of the 1970s that hindsight deviations have obtained serious scientific research. Today’s world-renowned risk analysis scholar and Carnegie Mellon University professor Baruch Fiskerhof is recognized by academics as the first person to see a deviation after research. At that time, he was also a young and energetic graduate student at the Hebrew University of Israel. His instructors were the two founders of behavioral economics-Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. In response to the hindsight bias, Feskovhof launched a series of experimental studies, of which the following two experiments are particularly famous.
In an experiment, the researchers presented the subjects with historical events they were not familiar with. For example, the war between the British in the 19th century and the Gorkhas of Nepal. After briefly describing the incident, the researchers listed four possible outcomes: the British defeated; the Gorkha won; the two-sided war and the British gained colonies; the two-sided war and the British did not obtain colonies. Finally, the researcher asked the subjects to be foreseeable (that is, not to inform the subjects of the actual results of the war) and hindsight (that is, to first randomly present the four possible results to the subjects as actual results, and then ask the subjects to assume I don’t know the actual result at all) Under two conditions, the possibility of four possible outcomes becoming facts is evaluated. The experiment found that the participants under the hindsight conditions