“What Determines Hindsight Bias in Written Work? One Field and Three Experimental Studies in the Context of Wikipedia”, 2022-08-04 ():
This research demonstrates that written work (eg. Wikipedia articles) can be biased by hindsight: After an event happened, written work is more suggestive of the event, mistakenly describing it as more foreseeable and inevitable than it had been. The stronger the need for explanation and the more causal information available, the more biased the writing. These findings are important because biased writing can bias the views of many people.
Hindsight bias not only occurs in individual perception but in written work (eg. Wikipedia articles) as well. To avoid the possibility that biased written representations of events distort the views of broad audiences, one needs to understand the factors that determine hindsight bias in written work.
Therefore, we tested the effect of 3 potential determinants: the extent to which an event evokes sense-making motivation, the availability of verifiable causal information regarding the event, and the provision of content policies. We conducted one field study examining real Wikipedia articles (n = 40) and 3 preregistered experimental studies in which participants wrote or edited articles based on different materials (total n = 720). In each experiment, we systematically varied one determinant.
Findings: provide further—and even more general—support that Wikipedia articles about various events contain hindsight bias. The magnitude of hindsight bias in written work was contingent on the sense-making motivation and the availability of causal information. We did not find support for the effect of content policies.
Findings: are in line with causal model theory and suggest that some types and topics of written work might be particularly biased by hindsight (eg. coverage of disasters, research reports, written expert opinions).
[Keywords: hindsight bias, text production, media, Wikipedia]
…To test for hindsight bias, et al 2018 extracted Wikipedia articles for 33 specific events from 6 event categories (ie. disasters, elections, official decisions, personal decisions, sports events, scientific findings). For each event, they retrieved 3 article versions from the revision history: the last article version that existed prior to the event (t1), the first article version that mentioned the event (t2), and the article version that existed 8 weeks after the occurrence of the event (t3).1 They then had 10 independent, trained coders who were blind to the research question judge the extent to which each article version suggested the occurrence of the respective event. The analyses identified hindsight bias in the t3 articles about disasters (ie. a statistically-significant t1−t3 increase in the suggestiveness ratings). For the remaining event categories, however, the authors found no evidence for hindsight bias in Wikipedia.