Knowledge updating in real-world estimation: Connecting hindsight bias and seeding effects.
Julia Groß, Barbara K. Kreis, Hartmut Blank, Thorsten Pachur · Journal of Experimental Psychology General · 2023
-improvements in people's estimation accuracy after exposure to numerical facts. This integrative perspective highlights a previously neglected facet of knowledge updating, namely, recalibration of metric domain knowledge, which can be expected to lead to transfer learning and thus improve estimation for objects from a domain more generally. We develop an experimental paradigm to investigate the association of hindsight bias with improved estimation accuracy. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that the classical approach to induce hindsight bias indeed produces transfer learning. In Experiment 2, we provide evidence for the novel prediction that hindsight bias can be triggered via transfer learning; this establishes a direct link from knowledge updating to hindsight bias. Our work integrates two prominent but previously unconnected research programs on the effects of knowledge updating in real-world estimation and supports the notion that hindsight bias is driven by adaptive learning processes. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).