In a study published in Cognition & Emotion, we examined hindsight bias in the context of the 2020 U.S. presidential election. We found that Republicans, who were disappointed by Biden’s victory, showed more hindsight bias than Democrats, who were relatively happier with the electoral result.
Hindsight bias is the tendency to believe that one could have predicted an outcome after it has occurred. While prior research suggests that cognitive changes, such as memory decline, may increase hindsight bias in older adults, findings on the role of emotion have been mixed. Further, the intersection of age and emotion in influencing hindsight bias has been unexplored in real-world contexts.
Given the emotionally charged nature of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, with its outcomes perceived positively or negatively depending on political affiliation, Dr. Julia Spaniol and I examined how emotions might influence hindsight bias in younger and older adults.
Prior studies have suggested that negative emotions can increase hindsight bias as people reinterpret events to cope with disappointment. We investigated whether similar patterns would emerge in a real-world, politically significant event, where individuals had personal stakes in the outcome based on their political affiliations.
We recruited 272 participants through Amazon’s MTurk platform, split into younger (ages 18-34) and older (ages 59-84) adults. Participants indicated their political affiliation, selecting from Democrat, Republican, or Third Party, which served as a proxy for emotional response to the election, with the assumption that Democrats would feel positively about Biden’s win and Republicans would feel negatively.
They completed an estimation task shortly before the election, where they predicted the distribution of electoral votes for each presidential candidate, with their predictions summing to the total of 538 electoral votes. Following the election, participants returned approximately three weeks later for a second part of the study, in which they were asked to recall their original electoral predictions.
Hindsight bias was quantified using the “proximity index,” which compared the accuracy of participants’ initial predictions with their recollections post-election. In both parts of the study, participants rated their emotional responses to the election outcome, which served a manipulation check.
We found a relationship between political affiliation and hindsight bias, particularly concerning predictions for Biden’s electoral outcome. Participants who identified as Republicans, and for whom Biden’s win represented a negative emotional outcome, demonstrated more hindsight bias when recalling their initial estimates of Biden’s electoral votes compared to Democrats, who perceived Biden’s win positively. This pattern suggests that negative emotions can magnify hindsight bias.
Interestingly, this effect persisted across both younger and older adults. It could be that the high public visibility and repeated media coverage of the election might have reduced age-based differences in cognitive processing, leveling the playing field between younger and older adults, and thereby minimizing the usual age-related discrepancies in memory recall.
When examining the hindsight bias for Trump’s electoral outcome, we found no significant difference between political groups. This may be because the public primarily focused their attention and emotional response on the victorious candidate, Biden, rather than on Trump’s loss.
One limitation is that we used political affiliation as a proxy for emotional response, which may not fully capture the complexity of participants’ emotions regarding the election.
Hindsight bias is hard to escape—almost everyone experiences it at some point. This cognitive tendency leads us to believe that we “knew it all along” after an event’s outcome is known. While it can cloud judgment, hindsight bias sometimes serves a psychological purpose, helping us to manage disappointment and other negative emotions, like when an election outcome defies our expectations.
Recognizing the influence of hindsight bias can enhance our self-awareness, fostering intellectual humility and curiosity. It invites us to reflect on why our predictions occasionally fall short and to better understand the limits of our foresight.
The research, “Emotional aftermath of the 2020 U.S. presidential election: a study of hindsight bias in younger and older adults”, was authored by Mane Kara-Yakoubian (@ManeYakoubian) and Julia Spaniol.