Hindsight Bias is a term used to refer to the phenomenon in which, in the aftermath of high-scale scandals, people claim the “signs were always there in plain sight”. The issue with Hindsight Bias is that it results in subsequent feelings of overestimating one’s ability to predict terrible events. It also is often used to disparage the lived experiences of real life witnesses and victims.
As discussed in our previous blog post, there’s a myriad of reasons why silent bystanders are created. Rarely do bystanders witness a crime and purposely choose to remain silent out of some sort of willfully malicious intent. However, that is the sentiment hindsight biases push. They create a mentality in which on-lookers of a scandal believe they could have and would have done a better job blowing the whistle on crime. This is a naive mentality that completely overlooks nuance and context.
On-lookers who develop hindsight bias lack critical thinking when it comes to concepts such as social pressures to stay silent, fears of job insecurity and other retaliations,and fear for one’s own life or safety. With regards to a Korean scandal such as Burning Sun, they also lack the cultural intelligence to consider hierarchies and social harmony—two cultural virtues in South Korea that often create environments in which people feel socially obligated to avoid conflict.
And the concept of conflict avoidance is not unique to Korea. In the 1960s, the Milgram Experiment revealed that 65% of people would administer what they believed were lethal electric shocks to strangers, with 100% of participants administering what they believed were extremely painful electric shocks, simply because an authority figure told them to. In The Asch Conformity Experiment, people knowingly gave wrong answers to questions due only to the fact that everyone else in the room was giving wrong answers. Both of these studies proved that social pressures are extremely influential in the way the average person behaves.
These studies challenge the hindsight bias mentality that many observers would have easily behaved differently had they been present during the scandal. While it is impossible to know how any individual would have acted under the same circumstances, the evidence suggests that social pressures, authority figures, and group dynamics exert a far greater influence on human behavior than most people realize. The assumption that one would have effortlessly resisted these pressures and spoken out does not simply overlook the complexity of the situation—it often reflects an overconfidence that social psychologists have repeatedly shown to be unwarranted.
Aside from that, a heavier issue with the “the warning signs were obvious/everybody knew” mentality is that it implicates people who were involved in the atrocities that took place. There is often a fan sentiment that the BigBang members were aware of Seungri’s crimes because they “tried to warn him about his friends”. However, it seems the people who make these statements don’t understand the implications of that narrative. If the BigBang members knew what they were supposedly warning Seungri about, that makes them complicit in his friends’ crimes for not reporting them. The problem with hindsight narratives is that they often assign knowledge selectively, implicating some individuals while absolving others, even when the same alleged knowledge would make all parties equally responsible for failing to act. These same people who unwittingly implicates the BigBang members for “knowing”, in the same breath, condemn Seungri for “knowing” and not doing anything.
Ironically, hindsight bias tends to emerge only after the social risk has disappeared. Once a scandal becomes public knowledge and public opinion settles around a particular narrative, speaking out is no longer costly. There is no threat to one’s employment, social standing, or personal safety. The authority figures who once held power may have fallen from grace, and the consensus that once discouraged dissent may have reversed entirely. In this environment, it becomes easy for observers to look backward and convince themselves that the warning signs were obvious. What they often fail to recognize is that they are evaluating the situation with the benefit of information, certainty, and social support that the people living through the events never possessed.
Hindsight Bias also stems from a thorough lack of situational awareness of the concept of ‘hindsight’. The phrase “hindsight is 20/20” exists for a reason. When looking back on a scandal with a now-comprehensive knowledge of its events, it’s exorbitantly easy to say “here are the warning signs”. However, without the present-day knowledge, warning signs may look like anything else. The human psyche is designed to normalize our surroundings. We don’t go into every situation looking for the hidden dangers. Most people are learned to look for the best in the people around us. We don’t look at a female coworker being uncomfortable around her boss and jump to the conclusion that he raped her, we assume maybe he denied her PTO or he called her into work on her day off.
Most people tend to operate in accordance with Occum’s Razor, which states “Among competing explanations, the one that makes the fewest assumptions is usually preferred.”. This is precisely why so many “obvious warning signs” only become obvious after a scandal has already been exposed. A celebrity spending time with controversial friends, an employee appearing nervous around management, or a business engaging in questionable practices may raise concerns in retrospect, but none of these observations inherently point to a specific crime. Prior to the revelation of a scandal, there are often dozens of possible explanations for unusual behavior, most of them far more mundane than organized criminal activity. Once the truth is known, however, people tend to work backward from the conclusion, discarding all of the innocent possibilities they once would have considered and convincing themselves that the outcome should have been predictable from the beginning.
A similar principle can be found in Hanlon’s Razor, which advises us to “never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” While Hanlon’s Razor is not a universal rule, it highlights another flaw in hindsight bias: the tendency to assume that every unusual behavior was evidence of deliberate wrongdoing. In reality, people are often motivated by far less sinister factors—poor judgment, ignorance, self-interest, social pressure, incompetence, or simple misunderstanding. Before a scandal is exposed, most observers naturally gravitate toward these more ordinary explanations because they are statistically more common. It is only after the truth emerges that people begin reinterpreting every awkward interaction, bad decision, or suspicious coincidence as proof that criminal activity was hiding in plain sight all along.
Ultimately, hindsight bias does not simply distort our understanding of scandals—it distorts our understanding of the people who lived through them. It encourages us to judge witnesses, victims, employees, friends, family members, and bystanders based on information they did not possess at the time. Rather than asking why someone failed to recognize a danger that only became obvious in retrospect, a more productive question is what obstacles prevented them from seeing or acting upon it in the first place. Scandals such as Burning Sun are not lessons in how easily wrongdoing can be identified; they are reminders of how difficult it can be to navigate uncertainty, social pressure, and incomplete information. Recognizing that reality requires humility—an acknowledgment that, had we occupied the same circumstances, we may not have behaved as differently as we would like to believe.
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