If I hear it, my peers hear it: hindsight bias in childhood

Abstract

In this study we evaluated the mechanisms underlying auditory hindsight bias in schoolchildren between 8 and 13 years of age. Hindsight bias shows the effect that knowledge of an outcome has on individuals’ judgments. Studies in adults have shown that the bias in hypothetical designs is a product of a misattribution of the fluency generated by knowledge of the outcome (e.g., “identity of a distorted word”) to the characteristics of the auditory stimulus itself. In this study we investigated whether these same fluency processes are at work in bias in infancy. To this end, we created an auditory retrospective bias task in which schoolchildren listened to various fragments of songs that appeared to contain a “hidden message”. The participants’ task was to estimate how many of a group of 6 classmates would identify the “hidden message” in each song. In the first phase, the students made their estimates without receiving any information about the content of the message. In the second phase, before listening to the song and making their estimates, the students were informed of the content of the message. This task included a repetition priming manipulation that altered the fluency with which half of the “hidden messages” were processed. The results showed a modulating effect of priming on the magnitude of the hindsight bias and suggest that, also in childhood, the bias is a product of a misattribution of fluency generated by knowledge of the outcome.