Integration of Hindsight Bias and Counterfactual Thinking: Decision-Making and Drug Courier Profiles

• NCJ Number: 171323
• Journal: Law and Human Behavior Volume: 21 Issue: 5 Dated: (October 1997) Pages: 539-560
• Author(s): J K Robbennolt; M S Sobus
• Date Published: 1997
• Length: 22 pages
• Grant Number(s): 5 T32 MH16156-15; 5 T32 MH16156-16
• Sponsoring Agency: National Institute of Mental Health
• Publication Format: Article
• Publication Type: Report (Study/Research)
• Language: English
• Country: United States of America

Annotation

This article investigates the relationship between counterfactual thinking and hindsight bias in a legal decisionmaking context using drug courier profiles and illegal search and seizure.

Abstract

Counterfactual thinking and hindsight bias have each generated separate, substantial bodies of research and provided insight into some areas of legal decisionmaking. Counterfactual thinking takes place when people make "if only" comparisons of actual outcomes with imagined alternative outcomes that could have occurred but did not. Hindsight bias is the tendency to overestimate the probability one assigns to an event once the outcome of that event is known, combined with a denial that such a judgment has been affected by knowledge of the outcome. The article discusses research findings, which demonstrate each of these cognitive processes and show a pattern of results that supports an integrative relationship between them, in the contexts of social cognition and of legal decisionmaking. The article also presents a causal model of decisionmaking in this context, and discusses specific implications of these findings for civil actions to remedy illegal searches. Notes, tables, figures, references