Why Your Younger Self Wasn’t Wrong: The Lies Hindsight Tells

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I revisit major turning points in my life and sometimes regret the decisions I made. I suspect most of us do that at some point. We look back at relationships that ended badly, jobs that turned out to be poor fits, friendships that fell apart, and decisions we wish we hadn’t made. And sooner or later, many of us find ourselves asking the same question: How did I not see it? How did I not see that relationship was going to fail? How did I not realize that person couldn’t be trusted? How did I not know that job would make me miserable?

Looking back, the answers often seem obvious. But that’s because we’re looking back with knowledge of how the story ended, and that changes how we interpret the facts. Psychologists have a name for this tendency. It’s called hindsight bias. Psychologist Baruch Fischhoff, who pioneered research on the topic, found that once people know how something turned out, they tend to believe the outcome was predictable. In retrospect, we often focus on the information that supports our eventual interpretation. Researchers sometimes call it the “I knew it all along” effect.

The problem is that we didn’t know it all along. At the time, we were making decisions with incomplete information.

In my twenties, I was seriously involved with a man I thought I would spend the rest of my life with. He was different from many of the men I had dated. He loved to cook and sew and fix things. He could repair just about anything. We met when we were both pursuing advanced degrees, and he agreed with me on the need for equality between men and women. He didn’t believe in traditional roles, he said. Men and women should be free to define their own lives. It was exactly what I wanted to hear. We moved in together.

Then my career took off. And suddenly I found myself with a partner who deeply resented my success.

“Why are you making more money than me when you have a psychology degree and I have a science degree?” he lamented one day.

The man who had talked so confidently about equality adhered to traditional gender roles when we lived together. I would come home after a long commute and find him in front of the TV drinking a beer.

“What are we having for dinner?” I’d ask.

“I don’t know. What are you making?” he would respond.

He contributed little to the cooking or cleaning, and when I complained that I had no time for anything except work and household responsibilities, he responded, “Well,” he said, “that’s what you get for having the big job.”

Eventually the relationship ended, and I spent a lot of time blaming myself. How could I not have seen this coming? Why had I been so focused on securing a commitment from him? His parents had traditional roles. He was often resentful of people who were more successful than he was. He tended to take offense easily and could become surprisingly angry over relatively minor things. On weekend drives, he would scream at other drivers and complain about people who seemed to have more than he did.

The signs were there. Or were they?

When I met him, I wasn’t successful. We were both students. And any resentment he had wasn’t directed at me. And he told me that he believed men and women should be equals. How exactly was I supposed to know how he would react to circumstances neither of us had experienced yet?

The truth is I couldn’t.

Years later, I had a similar experience with a job. The firm offered me an equity-track position, meaning I could eventually become part owner. They told me they needed exactly the skills I brought to the table. There were a few things I didn’t love. The office felt outdated. The furniture was definitely from the 1970s, and the large metal desks and file cabinets had not aged well. And I wasn’t entirely sure that a couple of the senior employees liked me. Still, the opportunity seemed promising, so I accepted it.

Within a year, I realized I had made a mistake. The firm had little interest in changing how it operated. The expertise they claimed to value wasn’t particularly welcome. Whenever I suggested a new approach, I generally heard the words, “Well, not this time. Not for this client. Not for this project.” Eventually I realized that “not this time” really meant “not ever.”

Again, I found myself looking backward. The old furniture should have told me everything I needed to know. The employees should have tipped me off. The clues were right there.

But were they?

The owners offered me a good salary, a respected title, and a vision of my future there. Why shouldn’t I have believed them?

The reality is that none of us have complete information when we make important decisions. We don’t know how people will change. We don’t know how circumstances will change. We can’t see the future.

Looking back, it all seems obvious. Hindsight has a way of changing how we view the past. We remember the warning signs and forget the reasons we were hopeful. We remember the red flags and forget the green ones.

In my relationship, there were certainly signs that should have concerned me. But there were also reasons to believe the relationship would work. He was kind and sensitive. He was willing to move for my career. And he told me that he believed men and women should be equals.

The same was true of the job. Yes, the office looked outdated. Yes, some of the employees were a little cold to me in the interview. But the owners offered me a great position and a competitive salary. They told me they valued my experience and what I could contribute to their firm. Why wouldn’t I believe them?

Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Herbert Simon built much of his work around a simple idea: we make decisions with limited information. We cannot know everything about a person, a job, a relationship, or a situation. And because we don’t have complete information, we can’t make perfect decisions. Simon called this “bounded rationality.” Rather than identifying the perfect choice, most of us settle on an option that seems good enough based on what we know at the time. He called this process “satisficing.”

Later research by psychologist Barry Schwartz found that people who constantly try to make the absolute best decision—what he called “maximizers”—tend to be less satisfied with their choices than people who accept that uncertainty is part of life. Maximizers spend more time second-guessing themselves and wondering whether another choice would have produced a better outcome.

I find that idea comforting. The goal isn’t to make perfect decisions. Perfect decisions are impossible because perfect information doesn’t exist. The goal is to make the best decision we can with the information available at the time.

Looking back can make us forget that.

We look at where the road ended and convince ourselves we should have known where it was headed the whole time. We judge our younger selves for not recognizing information that only became meaningful years later.

But life doesn’t work that way. The person you were ten, twenty, or thirty years ago wasn’t standing at the end of the story with the benefit of knowing how it turned out. That person was simply doing the best they could with what they knew at the time.

Perhaps the mistake isn’t what we did. The mistake is expecting our younger selves to have known the future.

Sources

Fischhoff, B. (1975). Hindsight is not equal to foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgment under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 1(3), 288–299. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-1523.1.3.288

Schwartz, B., Ward, A., Monterosso, J., Lyubomirsky, S., White, K., & Lehman, D. R. (2002). Maximizing versus satisficing: Happiness is a matter of choice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(5), 1178–1197. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.83.5.1178. PMID: 12416921.

Simon, H. A. (1956). Rational choice and the structure of the environment. Psychological Review, 63(2), 129–138. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0042769