The British firemen's strike of 1977/78: An investigation of judgements in foresight and hindsight

Abstract

Recent research by Fischhoff and his colleagues has indicated that the effect of outcome knowledge (hindsight) on perceptions of social events is to encourage an inappropriate ‘knew‐it‐all‐along’ effect. The experiment reported here investigated the effect with respect to the British firemen's strike of 1977/78 and found only partial support: ( a ) hindsight bias is not a particularly strong phenomenon; ( b ) requiring judges to generate their own outcomes, rather than follow the standard procedure of assigning probability assessments to specified outcomes, indicated that judges may be able to more accurately reconstruct a foresight state; ( c ) judges asked to make two assessments, first after reading a summary of how the strike ended, and then after reading details about the first four weeks of the strike, showed more of a bias after reading the latter type of information. The findings are discussed in terms of attributional bias and Tversky & Kahneman's heuristics of thinking.