Hindsight bias

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The Street Survival Newsline with Calibre Press

By Dave Smith
Lead Street Survival Seminar Instructor

Did you ever notice that watching a movie for the second or third or tenth time never brings the same rush as watching it for the first time did? Sure you did, and yet we often don’t think about the how’s and why’s of our human brain and its oddities.

This particular phenomenon wouldn’t matter if the same effect we have when watching a movie numerous times also occurs when we write, read or evaluate a use of force report. Too often we trainers try to define the perfect response to a crisis when reviewing the footage of an officer in a critical incident.

Administrators often do the same thing when deciding if an officer should be exonerated, trained or punished in the review of a use of force action…they seek the perfect option and fall prey to “hindsight bias.”

First, perfection is rarer than diamonds and when it comes to human decision making, perfection is about as difficult as a task can be. The way our brain works is, it finds an option it recognizes from training, experience, metaphor, stories, or whatever…it just sees the critical incident building and recognizes it is time to do this or that action.

In Sources of Power, Gary Klein states that the brain usually takes action that satisfies and suffices to fulfill the threat. This is called “Satisficing” and to expect perfection from our men and women even under non-stressful situations would be insanity. We should instead evaluate the decisions as whether they “satisfice” a given situation.

Secondly, as we evaluate a given crisis and an officer’s actions, remember the difference between your brain as the evaluator after the fact not at threat and that of the officer’s going into the crisis in the moment.

You see, even the officer involved in the critical incident will probably not remember it after its conclusion as he or she perceived it going into it initially, as an ambiguous novel event. Going into a crisis we don’t know what the ending will be, what the real threat is, what will happen! Once we know the ending of the story even the participating officers will forget much of the ambiguity, the fear, the doubt they felt just seconds before.

This is what hindsight bias does, it erases ambiguity and creates a sense of certainty that shouldn’t exist.

“Monday morning quarterbacking” is the same phenomena; we all know what the Bears, Broncos, or Browns should have done last Sunday. We know the ending of the game and can actually go back in our memories and seemingly remember the exact play, or decision that cost the game.

Officers Monday-morning themselves, very often immediately after a critical incident, and it often hurts them in preparing an honest report of what happened; they forget they were totally naïve as to what the real threats might or might not be and write their reports without recreating the ambiguity, fear, and doubt they felt. After all, no one ever is going to get a call such as, “respond to 110 West Elm and shoot the occupant!”

Yet, for most officers they feel as if that was the call they were sent on when remembering the domestic violence call at 110 West Elm where they shot Joe Dirtbag.

Trainers, administrators and especially the media would do well to try to remember to review all police actions with a sense of ignorance, just like when we all watched our favorite movie for the first time. Would Luke Skywalker survive, was Hans Solo a mercenary jerk who would take the money and run or return and save Luke? If I tell you the ending now and you haven’t seen it there is no thrill, no rush, no anxiety, no great movie.

A lot of research is going on today to try to get officers to give accurate and clear reports about use of force, especially deadly force, and I look forward to the various points that are constantly coming out. Unfortunately, we don’t spend much time thinking about the frames of reference of those who will be evaluating that use of force. We need to truly understand that “Hindsight Bias” is an essential step in making sure we learn the real lessons and judge the decisions made correctly.

All this came to me as I read the headlines of the shooting in New York of a fellow whom officers shot at “approximately fifty times.” The entire story was written backwards, from the ending to the beginning, trying to make it seem incredible that the officers could have done such a thing. Read that story in the correct timeline and give some of the officer’s frame of reference and suddenly it isn’t so spectacular. But, then, the media isn’t trying to make a good movie, and cops are just trying to stay safe

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