Patient Safety Glossary

Hindsight Bias

The tendency to judge the events leading up to an accident as errors because the bad outcome is known; the more severe the outcome, the more likely that decisions leading up to the outcome will be judged as errors, judging the antecedent decisions as errors implies that the outcome was preventable, those reviewing events after the fact see the outcome as more foreseeable and therefore more preventable than they would have appreciated in real time.

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