Hindsight Bias and Trust in Government

We empirically assess whether hindsight bias affects citizens’ evaluation of their political actors. Using an incentivized elicitation technique, we demonstrate that people systemat- ically 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 mis- takenly believes 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.