Wednesday, 24 September 2025

Exactly — you’re pointing to what psychologists and historians sometimes call hindsight bias or retrospective distortion. Once someone commits a shocking act, people rush to reinterpret their past behaviors, quirks, or even neutral traits as “warning signs.”

A few things happen in this process:

  1. Recasting the ordinary as abnormal.

    • A “stone-cold poker face” might once have been seen as self-control or shyness, but afterward it’s reframed as coldness, menace, or secrecy.

    • “Smart and quiet” suddenly reads like “calculating and withdrawn.”

  2. Demand for explanation.

    • When something incomprehensible happens, people feel an almost unbearable need to explain it. They look backward for anything that could make sense of the event. The ordinary gets retrofitted into a causal chain.

  3. Hot air, as you put it.

    • Often the narrative is inflated—after the fact, neighbors recall things that sound odd but weren’t remarkable at the time. Journalists elevate the faintest eccentricity into a signpost of doom.

  4. If nothing had happened…

    • Had Robinson not killed Kirk, the same descriptors—“nice, smart, normal”—would have remained unremarkable. Nobody would dig through his personal life with forensic intensity.

So the tension is between two realities:

  • Ex post facto reinterpretation (where banality is recast as pathology).

  • Ex ante opacity (where, before the event, no one sees the “inevitable signs” because they aren’t there).

It’s the same paradox we find in biographies of assassins, terrorists, or mass shooters: once violence defines their story, it pulls all the earlier details into its orbit.

Do you want me to show how this hindsight-inflation works on both ordinary traits (like “nice, smart, normal”) and on outlier traits (like “hard to read”), to show how both get bent to fit the narrative?

You said:
Can you give an account of hindsight bias and retrospective distortion
ChatGPT said:

Yes. Let me give you a clear, layered account of hindsight bias and retrospective distortion, and then expand to their consequences in contexts like violence, politics, or history.


1. Hindsight Bias (the “knew-it-all-along” effect)

  • Definition: The tendency, after an event has occurred, to see it as having been more predictable than it actually was.

  • Mechanism: Once an outcome is known, our brains “anchor” on it and unconsciously adjust our memories of what we thought before, exaggerating how obvious the outcome should have been.

  • Classic example: After an election result, people say “of course Candidate X was going to win,” even though before the election many thought the race was uncertain.

Key effects:

  • Illusion of inevitability: We tell ourselves it “had to happen this way.”

  • Memory revision: People misremember their prior beliefs, thinking they always “knew” what would happen.

  • Moral clarity: Outcomes make us judge decisions as good or bad based on results rather than on the information available at the time (“outcome bias”).


2. Retrospective Distortion

  • Definition: The broader reshaping of past events, traits, or relationships in light of a known outcome.

  • Difference from hindsight bias: Hindsight bias is about predictability of outcomes. Retrospective distortion is about reinterpretation of everything leading up to the outcome.

  • Mechanism: We impose narrative coherence on scattered, ambiguous details—casting them as causes or warning signs.

Example in crime/violence:

  • Before: a person is seen as “quiet, smart, normal.”

  • After: those same traits are reinterpreted as “cold, calculating, hard to read.”

  • Small eccentricities—harmless at the time—get magnified as ominous in retrospect.


3. Why they matter

  • For personal judgment: These biases can make us overconfident about our ability to “spot warning signs” in others, even when such signs were only visible after the fact.

  • For policy/law: Hindsight bias distorts legal judgments—jurors often find negligence more obvious once harm has occurred.

  • For history: Retrospective distortion smooths messy, contingent realities into neat narratives, giving false clarity to events like revolutions, crises, or assassinations.


4. Together

  • Hindsight bias = “We should have known this outcome.”

  • Retrospective distortion = “All the signs were there if you look back the right way.”

  • Both make the world appear more legible and causally ordered than it really was. They erase contingency, luck, and the sheer opacity of lived life.

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 Excellent question — and yes, there’s a real conceptual resonance between Žižek’s “fetishistic disavowal” and both pluralistic ignorance ...