The New York Times praised her grit and her “flinty practicality.” “What she has lacked in rhetorical brio, she has made up for by listening to people’s problems and prescribing solutions,” it explained.

And at Vox, Ezra Klein gave a definitive recounting of Clinton’s strengths as a politician. She worked patiently and relentlessly to build a coalition that carried her to victory. “Whether you like Clinton or hate her — and plenty of Americans hate her — it's time to admit that the reason Clinton was the one to break [the glass ceiling] is because Clinton is actually really good at politics,” he wrote.

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From this vantage, the threat posed by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont seems to shrink in significance. A Politico report says that top Sanders aides have known for a while that his campaign was doomed: “It’s been weeks, if not months, since they themselves realized he wasn’t going to win.” For all the millennial enthusiasm he inspired, was the “Bern” ever really palpable? It’s getting harder and harder to remember what all the fuss was about.

These are the thoughts of hindsight.

The truth is, of course, that winners get to rewrite history. But they also get a lot of help from our own cognitive biases. The human mind is seduced by clean narratives, and the aftermath of an election is a ripe time for post-rationalization. In the coming days, expect to hear people reanalyzing Clinton’s performance for underappreciated strengths; expect to hear them laying out Sanders’s overlooked weaknesses.

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Psychologists call this hindsight bias — a process of mental laundering that makes past events start to seem inevitable. Our minds come up with stories to explain what happened. Then, we start to privilege evidence that supports that narrative, while playing down other facts.

We do this in part because we are wired to find meaning in the world. “People have a need to see the world as predictable and find it threatening to believe that many outcomes are at the mercy of unknown, random chance,” write psychologists Neal Roese and Kathleen Vohs in their review of the research on hindsight bias. They describe the phenomenon as "an oversimplification of the past and a scrubbing away of prior uncertainty, doubt and complication."

It's a well studied habit that shows up not just in politics, but everywhere. Hindsight bias can make doctors think that a certain diagnosis was obvious, when the facts were much blurrier. It can sway juries by making them think that defendants "should have known better."

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This powerful drive can even rewrite our memories. We can conveniently forget certain events — even things that we said ourselves. In our flawed recollections, we are always more prescient, and the world is always more predictable. German researchers have documented, for instance, that we often misremember our own past opinions. They asked subjects to write down predictions for an upcoming election. Four months after the election, the subjects remembered themselves being more accurate than they actually were.

How do we minimize hindsight bias? Psychologists say that we can train ourselves by deliberately thinking through all of the reasons something shouldn’t have happened. This is why Peter Beinart’s recent column in the Atlantic magazine is a must-read, because it explains what a remarkable comeback Clinton has made.

“In retrospect,” Beinart writes, “it seems obvious that Hillary Clinton emerged from her 2008 defeat to become the front-runner in 2016. But at the time, it wasn’t obvious at all.” He reminds us, in excruciating detail, of Clinton’s repeated humiliations on the 2008 campaign trail.

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And as Klein argues, those who feel that this primary was rigged in Clinton’s favor are discounting all of the work she did behind the scenes.

We don't really understand why things happen. That should not stop us from trying to make sense of it all, but we should remember that our brains are addicted to explanations, even when our explanations aren't quite right.