History & CultureMental model
Why every collapse looks 'inevitable' in hindsight.
Hindsight bias makes you treat an outcome you know as having been predictable. The fall of Rome, the Reformation, the French Revolution: all look inevitable today because you read the chain backwards. Contemporaries lived through open situations with many possible endings. The psychologist Baruch Fischhoff demonstrated the effect experimentally in 1975.
Useful: When judging a historical decision, cover up the outcome and read only what was known beforehand.
Source: en.wikipedia.org