Time is of the Essence? Investigating How Culturally-Based Perceptions of Time Affect Hindsight Bias for Task Completion

Abstract

Hindsight bias, known as the “Monday Morning Quarterback” syndrome, occurs when individuals feel they would have been able to predict the outcome to past events. This research examined if hindsight effects for personally-relevant task completion differs in monochronic cultures, which have a one-at-a-time approach to deadlines, and polychronic cultures, which are accustomed to working on many things at once. Based upon self-serving mechanisms, it was predicted and found that the former group would be more likely to show hindsight distortion. Participants made a list of tasks they planned to complete in a few weeks. After that time period, half the participants were asked to recall their number of listed tasks, and half provided recall estimates after noting how many tasks they had completed. As expected, relative to the polychronic group, the monochronic group’s retrospective judgments were biased in the direction of outcome information. Discussion focuses on applications and future research.