Hindsight Bias and Trust in Government

Holger Herz; Deborah Kistler; Christian Zehnder; Christian Zihlmann

doi:10.1162/rest_a_01421

Hindsight Bias and Trust in Government

Holger Herz¹; Deborah Kistler²; Christian Zehnder³; Christian Zihlmann⁴

¹ University of Fribourg · ² ETH Zurich · ³ University of Lausanne · ⁴ University of Fribourg and Bern University of Applied Sciences

The Review of Economics and Statistics 2026

We empirically assess whether hindsight bias affects citizens’ evaluation of their political actors. Using an incentivized elicitation technique, we demonstrate that people systematically misremember their past policy preferences regarding how to best fight the COVID-19 pandemic. At the peak of the first wave in the United States, the average respondent mistakenly believed that they supported significantly stricter restrictions at the onset of the first wave than they actually did. Exogenous variation in the extent of hindsight bias, induced through a randomized survey experiment, indicates that hindsight bias has a negative causal impact on the change in trust in government.

DOI: 10.1162/rest_a_01421
Volume: 108 (3)
Pages: 572-581
Language: en
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