Prospective Hindsight Technique in a Nutshell
Prospective hindsight is a simple but effective technique for coming up with more detailed explanations and generating more specific, concrete reasons. The essence of this technique is to think about a future event with certainty. Certainty, in turn, gives birth to explanations that are more specific and concrete, and such explanations may in turn reduce cognitive biases.
Research on Prospective Hindsight
A 1989 study by Deborah Mitchell, Edward Russo, and Nancy Pennington analyzed whether people would generate more reasons if they thought about an event with certainty.[1] The researchers knew from earlier studies that people come up with longer explanations when they analyze past events. So they wondered whether it is merely because an event happened in the past or because of the certainty with which people think about past events. So they tested their idea that what matters is the certainty.
The subjects read about a woman who was giving a large party to her coworkers; then they had to think up with various reasons why the party succeeded or why it failed.
Imagine that you work at a major consumer products firm. A good friend of yours, Heather, has been employed for eight months as a brand assistant. Single and her mid-twenties, she is determined to combine both a successful career and a satisfying social life. Recently, for professional and social reasons she has decided to give a large dinner party. She has spared no expense to make the party a huge success.
Some subjects were asked to imagine that the party might have succeeded or it might succeed:
- Past uncertain: “Please list as many reasons as you can think of why the party may have been a great success.”
- Future uncertain: “Please list as many reasons as you can think of why the party may be a great success.”
Others were asked to imagine that the party already happened and it was a great success, or that it will happen and will certainly succeed:
- Past certain: “As it turned out, the party was a great success. Please list as many reasons as you can think of why the party was a great success.”
- Future certain: “As it will turn out, the party will be a great success. Please list as many reasons as you can think of why the party will be a great success.”
The results suggest that it doesn’t matter whether people think about the past or future, what matters is the certainty with which they think about an event. So the subjects who thought about the future event with certainty generated longer explanations than those who considered the past event with uncertainty. Overall, the certainty gave birth to 30% more reasons and twice as many action-based reasons than abstract reasons (listing specific actions like “she greeted guests with a smile,” instead of abstract explanations like “she was friendly”).
Abstract vs. Concrete Explanations
As the researchers pointed out, concrete explanations are often superior, for example, because they may help to reduce some of our cognitive biases. Yet, it would overgeneralization to suggest that concrete thinking is always better, even though some experts suggest that prospective hindsight increases “the ability to correctly identify reasons.” [2] In fact, whether prospective hindsight helps to correctly identify reasons depends whether concrete thinking in a particular situation will be superior to abstract thinking.
Over the last 15 years there has been extensive research published on construal-level theory, examining how abstract and concrete thinking affects prediction, preferences, probability estimates, risk perception, judgment, decision-making, problem-solving, and creativity. In the future posts, I’ll probably discuss in more detail various findings from the research on construal-level theory, but in short, neither abstract thinking nor concrete thinking is superior overall. For instance, more concrete representations work better than abstract ones when trying to explain other people’s actions or predict their behavior, because concrete explanations are more likely to take into account the situational factors and decrease the correspondence bias which places too much weight on people’s attitudes, values, and other internal characteristics, disregarding any situational pressures which drive their behavior. Yet, more abstract thinking usually works better than concrete thinking when creativity or accurate risk perception is required.
Notes
[1] Deborah J. Mitchell, J. Edward Russo, Nancy Pennington, Back to the Future: Temporal Perspective in the Explanation of Events, Journal of Behavioral Decision Making 2, 25-38 (1989).
[2] Gary Klein, Performing a Project Premortem, Harvard Business Review, 2007; available at <https://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem>
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