A Study of Hindsight Bias: The Rodney King Case in Retrospect
- 1 April 1994
- journal article
- research article
- Published by SAGE Publications in Psychological Reports
- Vol. 74 (2) , 383-386
- https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1994.74.2.383
Abstract
68 subjects completed a short questionnaire asking them to predict, five days before a verdict was reached, the outcome and aftermath of the well-publicized Rodney King civil rights trial. Ten days after the verdict was reached, the subjects were asked to recall their responses to the questionnaire. Results were compatible with hindsight bias inasmuch as errors in recall were more likely to be consistent than inconsistent with the trial's outcome and aftermath. The hindsight bias phenomenon was interpreted in the context of a reconstructionist approach to memory.Keywords
This publication has 7 references indexed in Scilit:
- A Demonstration of Hindsight Bias Using the Thomas Confirmation VotePsychological Reports, 1993
- Hindsight: Biased judgments of past events after the outcomes are known.Psychological Bulletin, 1990
- Human memory: An adaptive perspective.Psychological Review, 1989
- Hindsight Distortion: “I knew‐it‐all along and I was sure about it”1Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 1986
- Stability and change in political attitudes: Observed, recalled, and ?explained?Political Behavior, 1986
- Semantic integration of verbal information into a visual memory.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 1978
- I knew it would happenOrganizational Behavior and Human Performance, 1975