Monday, April 26, 2010

An amusing case of hindsight bias

Hindsight bias is a propensity to see events that happened as much more predictable that they could possibly have been before they had actually happened. Here's an example from ancient history: team Romania during 1998 soccer world cup in France. After winning their group in the first round stage of the competition, and before their first knock-out game with Croatia, the entire Romanian team dyed their hair yellow (see picture below).


The team then proceeded to lose the game 0-1 which ended the tournament for them. I remember reading tons of articles in sports press at that time saying that everyone should have seen Romania's loss coming because, since Romanians were paying so much attention to unimportant things such as dying their hair yellow it was obvious that they weren't focused enough on soccer.

Does anyone have any doubt that, if Romania happened to win that game and advance, those very same journalists would afterwards be writing about how everyone should have seen Romania's win coming because a vivid display of unity such as everyone dying their hair yellow was a strong indicator of how focused and dedicated their team really was?

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