If I would have just…
Have you ever noticed how clear it all seems when you look back on a situation? It becomes obvious to see what we should have done and how that would have made everything better. If we would have just done that one thing, then…
As I’m writing this, I am sitting in my office, the only sound is the air from my fan and the sound machine right outside my door. Things are peaceful. Would it make any sense right now for me to put my computer down and go check out the rest of the building? Of course not, I have no reason to do that. However, let’s say that on the other side of the building, there is someone robbing the businessnext door, what is going to be my first thought after I learn that later? “If I would have just walked over there, I could have stopped it?” As though, some how, I should have known what I had no way of knowing in this moment. Not too mention, I assume that I could have stopped it, that everything would have been better. However, couldn’t it also be worse? Maybe because I startle that person, they start to shoot when otherwise they would have just run out of the building.
This is called hindsight bias, it is a type of thought and memory distortion that tells us that we knew things that we didn’t actually know at the time and that, had we done something different, the outcome would have been better.
Here’s the thing, by the time we look back onto a situation, we have new information that we didn’t have then and we can’t possibly known what would have happened. We believe that the outcome was more predictable than it actually was, based on what we know now. It also leads to a tremendous amount of self blame.
This goes back to my last post, the reality is, we do the best we can with what we know at that time.
Hindsight Bias: If I would have just not walked down that street, then I wouldn’t have been attacked.
Reality: Taking that street was the fastest way home, I had no way of knowing that I would be attacked.
Hindsight Bias: If I had just stayed at the party, I could have kept her from driving home drunk and she wouldn’t have gotten in trouble.
Reality: I was tired and she wanted to stay. I didn’t know the choice she would make. She also may have not let me take her keys or ended up going home with someone else and something else could have happened to her.
We cannot expect ourselves to know what we don’t know. Even if “the signs were there”, if we had no reason to look for them, why would we? We look back with a whole new lens that picks up those signs that weren’t actually relevant at the time (i.e. back to my first example, I may blame myself because I heard the door close and a muffled voice…but at this moment, would that really be significant – of course not). Also, if nothing bad had happened, would you have still questioned your decision and thought that you should have done something different? What we did, based on what we knew, was reasonable. It made sense at the time.