Der Hindsight Bias bei gustatorischen Entscheidungen

The hindsight bias is the tendency of people to falsely believe that they would have predicted the outcome of an event correctly, once the outcome is known. Several studies show that the hindsight bias is a robust phenomenon and that it has been demonstrated in a wide variety of decision problems. The present paper shows for the first time that the hindsight bias can also be found in decisions that relate to taste. All participants tasted the same wine. Some of them received fictitious information about the wine's sweetness. Participants who were told the wine was dry judged the same wine as less sweet than participants who were told the wine was sweet. We further analyzed the moderating role of meta-cognitions for the magnitude of the hindsight bias. According to the biased reconstruction explanation of the hindsight bias (for an overview see Stahlberg and Maass, 1998) participants who judge themselves as wine experts should reveal a stronger hindsight bias than participants who judge themselves as novices. The results of our study do not support this assumption. There were no differences in the magnitude of the hindsight bias between wine experts and novices.