The Believing Brain - Michael Shermer [140]
We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning. What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts. Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones.
Hindsight Bias
In a type of time-reversal confirmation bias, the hindsight bias is the tendency to reconstruct the past to fit with present knowledge. Once an event has occurred, we look back and reconstruct how it happened, why it had to happen that way and not some other way, and why we should have seen it coming all along.9 Such “Monday-morning quarterbacking” is literally evident on the Monday mornings following a weekend filled with football games. We all know what plays should have been called … after the outcome. Ditto the stock market and the endless parade of financial experts whose prognostications are quickly forgotten as they shift to post hoc analysis after the market closes. It’s easy to “buy low, sell high” once you have perfect information, which is available only after the fact when it is too late.
The hindsight bias is on prominent display after a major disaster, when everyone thinks that they know how and why it happened, and why our experts and leaders should have seen it coming. NASA engineers should have known that the O-ring on the space shuttle Challenger’s solid rocket booster joints would fail in freezing temperatures leading to a massive explosion, or that a small foam strike on the leading edge of the wing of the space shuttle Columbia would result in its destruction upon reentry. Such highly improbable and unpredictable events become not only probable but practically certain after they happen. The hand-wringing and finger-pointing by the members of NASA’s investigative commissions tasked with determining the causes of the two space shuttle disasters were case studies in the hindsight bias. Had such certainty really existed before the fact, then of course different actions would have been taken.
The hindsight bias is equally evident in times of war. Almost immediately following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, for example, conspiracy theorists went to work to prove that President Roosevelt must have known it was coming because of the so-called bomb plot message that U.S. intelligence intercepted in October 1941: a Japanese agent in Hawaii had been instructed by his superiors in Japan to monitor warship movements in and around the naval base at Pearl. That sounds fairly damning and, in fact, there were eight such messages dealing with Hawaii as a possible target that were intercepted and decrypted by U.S. intelligence before December 7. How could our leaders not have seen it coming? They must have, and therefore they let it happen for nefarious and Machiavellian reasons. So say the conspiracy theorists with their hindsight bias dialed up to full.
Between May and December of that year, however, there were no less than fifty-eight messages intercepted regarding Japanese ship movements indicating an attack on the Philippines, twenty-one messages involving Panama, seven messages affiliated with attacks in Southeast Asia and the Netherlands East Indies, and even seven messages connected to the United States’ West Coast. There were so many intercepted messages, in fact, that army intelligence stopped sending memos to the White House out of concern that there might be a breach in security leading the Japanese to realize that we had broken their codes and were reading their mail.10
President George W. Bush was subject to the same type of conspiratorial hindsight bias after 9/11,