Hindsight bias creates illusion of doomed relationships
Study finds that we are more likely to feel as if we saw a breakup coming once we know it happened.
12 June 2023
Sometimes the imminent end of a relationship seems pretty obvious. Cheating, a change in priorities, or just the lack of a spark are all pretty identifiable red flags that the end is nigh. Other times a breakup sneaks up on us, and we're left feeling blindsided. The point at which we realised that things were coming to a close, however, can get a little blurry after the split.
Writing in the Social Psychological Bulletin, a team from the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire explore the role of hindsight foreseeing in the end of romantic relationships. Their findings suggest that we have a tendency to feel like we knew all along that a breakup was on the horizon — but only after the breakup has actually occurred.
For their investigation, the team recruited 515 adults, showing them a story about a fictional couple, Sofia and Daniel. The story described the couple's strengths, such as being open and honest with each other, and also their incompatibilities, such as religious conflicts and having different friend groups that don't support their relationship. From this story, it was easy to imagine either a positive or negative outcome for Sofia and Daniel's relationship.
Participants were then split into three conditions. Those in the control condition did not receive any information about the fate of Sofia and Daniel's relationship. Instead, they completed ratings of whether or not they thought the couple would break up, and evaluated how good a fit they were for each other. Finally, they indicated whether or not they would be surprised if the couple had broken up in six months.
Participants in the two experimental conditions, however, were told either that Sofia and Daniel had broken up or that they were still together. They then indicated on an 11-point scale how much they had expected the couple to be broken up and how obvious it was that it was going to happen, and responded to the same measures as control participants on the qualities of the relationship.
This knowledge of how the relationship ended affected relationship forecasts, judgments of how obvious the coming breakup had seemed, and judgements of relationship quality. Participants who knew the couple had broken up stated a stronger expectation for the break up than those in the other conditions, and gave less positive judgements of relationship quality than those who believed the couple were still together.
Those who were told that the couple did not break up, on the other hand, did not differ from those who were told nothing about what happened to the relationship, rating the couple as equally stable. This dichotomy suggests that there is a hindsight bias in appraisals of relationships: people believe they would have anticipated a breakup, but only when they know it has already happened.
The team attempted to replicate their findings in a second study — only this time, some participants read that Sofia and Daniel had not merely stayed together, but got engaged six months after the vignette. In line with previous findings, participants who were told that the couple had split up reported a stronger expectation that they would have broken up than those in the other conditions, as well as rated the relationship more negatively. Similarly to the first study, those given positive outcome knowledge did not differ from those who had no outcome knowledge — even though they had read that the couple were engaged. As the team suggest, this could be because those given no extra information simply assumed the couple were still together.
Taken together, these findings suggest that imminent breakups become more obvious to us in hindsight. When we don't know the outcome of a relationship, we don't feel like we intuitively 'knew' it would end in the same way. The team suggests this may be an example of 'hindsight bias', a "byproduct of humans' ability to constantly update their knowledge base and make sense of new information."
Whether or not this would apply outside of straight-appearing romantic relationships was not covered in the study, nor was the mechanism of hindsight bias. Future research could explore these aspects further, but from these results alone, it looks like we may have to reassess how highly we rate our own intuition.
Read the paper in full: https://doi.org/10.32872/spb.9967
