Unveiling Memory’s Role in the Hindsight Bias: A Relative Accessibility Account

Research on the hindsight bias with the memory design has mainly focused on the mechanisms underlying the biased reconstruction of the original judgments after the presentation of the correct answers, as well as on the robustness and generalizability of the bias. Less attention has been paid to the memory processes that hinder the recall of the original judgments (recollection bias) or promote their biased reconstruction (reconstruction bias) after the presentation of the correct answers. However, memory processes are important to explain the cognitive underpinnings of these biases. In three experiments with the memory design, we contrasted the relative accessibility, discriminability, and context change hypotheses on the memory underpinnings of the size of the recollection and reconstruction biases. The findings provided more support for the relative accessibility hypothesis: When the memory traces of the original judgments were more accessible relative to the interfering traces of the correct answers, the size of the recollection and reconstruction biases was smaller.