The "I knew it all along" phenomenon is also commonly referred to as the hindsight bias. It involves the tendency people have to assume that they knew the outcome of an event after the outcome has already been determined. For example, after attending a baseball game, you might insist that you knew that the winning team was going to win beforehand.
Students often experience this phenomenon after learning the results of a particular experiment or research study. "Of course," you might think, "I knew it all along!" This can be a dangerous habit for students to fall into, however, particularly when test time approaches. By assuming that you already knew the information, you might fail to adequately study the test materials. You might then find that when you're faced with the test questions, you didn't really know the information as well as you thought you did.
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