Complexity in simulation-based education: exploring the role of hindsight bias

Simulation-based education (SBE) has the potential to misrepresent clinical practice as relatively simplistic, and as being made safer through simplistic behavioural explanations. This review provides an overview of a well-documented and robust psychological construct - hindsight bias in the context of learning in healthcare simulations. Motivating this review are our observations that post-simulation debriefings may be oversimplified and biased by knowledge of scenario outcomes. Sometimes only limited consideration is given to issues that might be relevant to management in the complexity and uncertainty of real clinical practice. We use literature on hindsight bias to define the concept, inputs and implications. We offer examples from SBE where hindsight bias may occur and propose suggestions for mitigation. Influences of hindsight biases on SBE should be addressed by future studies.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  Advances in Simulation

• Publication date

  2016-01-11

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Education, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1186/s41077-015-0005-7PMID 29449972PMCID 5796605
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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