Overclaiming shares processes with the hindsight bias

Overclaiming is the degree to which individuals claim knowledge about factually nonexistent terms. Whereas overclaiming is often considered to reflect motivational misreporting, we argue that overclaiming involves biased (meta-)cognitive processing, i.e., sense-making and the misattribution of fluency. These processes also contribute to the hindsight bias: When individuals receive the correct answer to a question, their recalled own prior answer tends to be biased towards the correct answer, which is partly due to biased reconstructions of the original answer. Supporting the idea that overclaiming and the hindsight bias involve similar processes, we show in the present study (N = 157) that overclaiming is positively related to reconstruction biases in the hindsight bias.