There have been several efforts to demonstrate the value of the humanities to policy in recent years, including helpful contributions from the British Academy , the Arts and Humanities Research Council and individual humanities scholars.
Some progress has been made, but as the historian Roger Kain put it in his October oral evidence to the House of Lords inquiry into chief scientific advisers speaking on behalf of the British Academy : "The term science and engineering seems at the moment to not exclude but marginalise the humanities and social science in relation to advice and expertise: culture, history, language, psychology, and political science".
The potential contribution of a number of "marginalised" disciplines merits discussion. Here we want to focus on history, and call for the evidence and expertise of historians to be taken more seriously in policy — particularly science policy — alongside evidence from the natural and social sciences.
Given Sir Mark Walport's support for the medical humanities and the history of science during his decade as director of the Wellcome Trust, we hope this is an agenda where he will want to demonstrate some leadership during his tenure as government chief scientific adviser.
We suggest that one way he could signal his commitment to the value of historical methods and insights in science policy would be to pilot a "hindsight project" within the government's existing Foresight Programme. In science policy, history often plays a role as example or justification, based on assumptions about how science is done or how innovation occurs that misrepresent our knowledge of the past.
As Virgina Berridge notes in her study of history in health policy , there can be a "totemic role" for historians, where historical messages are "misunderstood or used for particular policy purposes". Historians, naturally, aim to mediate the history used in the public sphere, ensuring that is not completely divorced from their research, most of which is publicly funded.
Initiatives like History and Policy are focused on encouraging historians to see the potential relevance of their work and, through policy-friendly reports, aim to show that "historians can shed light on the causes of current problems and even suggest innovative solutions".
Historians have occasionally found a role within policymaking through research focused on topics of recent history and obvious relevance. One example is Catherine Haddon who, having produced a thesis on Whitehall and cold war defence, is now a research fellow at the Institute for Government. Similarly, there was interest in historian Abigail Wood's work on foot and mouth disease , in the immediate aftermath of the crisis of However, there is a role for broader input from the history of science and allied disciplines, if a mechanism can be found to bring this evidence into the policymaking process.
Last month, the case for historical advisers in government departments received a high-profile endorsement from Lord Butler, the former cabinet secretary. His timing was deliberate: with momentum building around the use of evidence in policy and new initiatives such as the Cabinet Office's network of "what works" centres, historians feel they are in danger of being undervalued as an asset to the policy process.
History of science can provide insights that may have general agreement within the discipline but sharper divergence from more popular accounts. Historians are good at judging the interests that lie behind differing interpretations of the past, as well as exploring their validity.
One example is the work of David Edgerton, who has highlighted a number of areas in which common assumptions in science policy are shown to be problematic. These include challenging the perceived economic and technological significance of publicly funded research, and cherished notions of researcher autonomy such as the "Haldane Principle". Although Edgerton has shown that the so-called "linear model" of innovation is a recent academic construct, created as a foil to better models, there is frequent recourse, both by science lobbyists and austerity-juggling politicians, to economic arguments for science funding that sound suspiciously similar.
The results of an election, for example, often seem more obvious after the tallies have been counted. In other words, things always seem more obvious and predictable after they have already happened. In psychology , this is what is referred to as the hindsight bias, and it can have a major impact on not only your beliefs but also on your behaviors. The term hindsight bias refers to the tendency people have to view events as more predictable than they really are.
Before an event takes place, while you might be able to offer a guess as to the outcome, there is really no way to actually know what's going to happen.
After an event, people often believe that they knew the outcome of the event before it actually happened. This is why it is often referred to as the "I knew it all along" phenomenon. After your favorite team loses the Super Bowl, you might feel convinced that you knew they were going to lose even though you didn't feel that way before the game. The phenomenon has been demonstrated in a number of different situations, including politics and sporting events.
In experiments, people often recall their predictions before the event as much stronger than they actually were. For example, researchers Dorothee Dietrich and Matthew Olson asked college students to predict how the U.
Senate would vote on the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas. The hindsight bias is often referred to as the "I-knew-it-all-along phenomenon. For example, after attending a baseball game, you might insist that you knew that the winning team was going to win beforehand. High school and college students often experience hindsight bias during the course of their studies. As they read their course texts, the information may seem easy.
This can be a dangerous habit for students to fall into, however, particularly when test time approaches. By assuming that they already knew the information, they might fail to adequately study the test materials.
When it comes to testing time, however, the presence of many different answers on a multiple-choice test may make many students realize that they did not know the material quite as well as they thought they did.
By being aware of this potential problem, however, students can develop good study habits to overcome the tendency to assume that they 'knew-it-all-along. So what exactly causes this bias to happen? Researchers suggest that three key variables interact to contribute to this tendency to see things as more predictable than they really are.
When all three of these factors occur readily in a situation, the hindsight bias is more likely to occur. When a movie reaches its end and we discover who the killer really was, we might look back on our memory of the film and misremember our initial impressions of the guilty character. We might also look at all the situations and secondary characters and believe that given these variables, it was clear what was going to happen. You might walk away from the film thinking that you knew it all along, but the reality is that you probably didn't.
The hindsight bias can have a negative influence on our decision-making. Part of what goes into making good decisions is realistically assessing their consequences.
It can lead to an overconfidence in our ability to predict these consequences. Ultimately, hindsight bias matters because it gets in the way of learning from our experiences. For example, after attending a baseball game, you might insist that you knew that the winning team was going to win beforehand. High school and college students often experience hindsight bias during the course of their studies. As they read their course texts, the information may seem easy.
Hindsight bias promotes the belief that adverse events are more foreseeable than they actually are and that errors in the causal chain are more culpable with the knowledge of the consequences. Hindsight is twenty-twenty. As we know, with years hindsight , this never happened. I have the benefit of historical hindsight. In hindsight I realized he knew exactly what he was doing and what I was going through. Logan had seemed off in hindsight , his gestures unnatural and his talk stilted.
Hindsight enriching foresight Dealing with nuance and complexity in evidence, and how perspective changes its interpretation, are commonplace skills in historical research and could be invaluable for mitigating potential policy failures and controversies, for example around new and emerging technologies. Quicksilver: This is S.
Quicksilver: Keep up, old man! The way Ultron sees it, Once you take away all the extraterrestrial threats, Humans are the ones causing all the ruckus. This causes him to take up an issue against Humanity.
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