Hindsight Bias and Trust in Government

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Herz, Holger; Kistler, Deborah; Zehnder, Christian; Zihlmann, Christian
• 署名单位: University of Fribourg; Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology Domain; ETH Zurich; University of Lausanne
• 刊物名称: REVIEW OF ECONOMICS AND STATISTICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0034-6535
• DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_01421
• 发表日期: 2026
• 关键词: knowledge; Foresight; JUDGMENT; online

摘要

We empirically assess whether hindsight bias affects citizens' evaluation of their political actors. Using an incentivized elicitation technique, we demonstrate that people systematically misremember their past policy preferences regarding how to best fight the COVID-19 pandemic. At the peak of the first wave in the United States, the average respondent mistakenly believed that they supported significantly stricter restrictions at the onset of the first wave than they actually did. Exogenous variation in the extent of hindsight bias, induced through a randomized survey experiment, indicates that hindsight bias has a negative causal impact on the change in trust in government.