Over and over, I hear people criticizing others for the choices they make in life. “They shouldn’t have done that! They should have done this!” Basically, people love to ‘Monday morning quarterback’ and take those moments to ‘should’ on those whom they perceive made the wrong choices.

Not surprisingly, I’ve been getting some of that as well. As people watch the heavily edited version of my life played back on Bravo, I get a lot of support and cheering on for things I did on the show—and I have received harsh criticism and concern about, well, other things I did on the show.

It’s almost as if people are watching my life unfold in real time, but like a Monday morning replay of a Sunday afternoon football game, that part of my life has already been played and there is nothing I can do at this point to change it. And believe me, this frustrates me too.

So this made me wonder: Why do we ‘Monday morning quarterback’? Now, I know what some of you are thinking—”I’m gay, I don’t watch football!” To which I would answer that you are generalizing, because some gay men do watch and love football.

And besides, who doesn’t like a good tight end? But I digress.

The technical name for ‘Monday morning quarterbacking’ is called “Hindsight Bias.” (I know, again with talking about hinds!) The problem with hindsight bias is that it can lead you to unfairly judge another person (or team) for their actions, when they may have made an honest—even unavoidable—mistake. Yes, a genuine mistake.

When we look at those who committed an action we disapprove of, we often can think of several other options that would have led to a better outcome (or so we think). If the team had only done one of those play thingies, they most certainly would have gotten the extra touchdown to win the game. If Janet Jackson had not been doing tequila shooters with Justin Timberlake after an afternoon of going through the bargain bin at the local TJ Maxx when she suddenly proclaimed “I have a great idea,” she wouldn’t have had a wardrobe malfunction. And if I had known that so many people would be upset that I had lunch with my father on my reality show, I probably would have had dinner.

The reason people ‘Monday morning quarterback’ is simple—they already know the outcome. They know how things turned out, so they get an inflated sense of their own foresight and claim they saw it coming. All the while, as these after-the-face experts are using their Hindsight Bias, they are neglecting the confusion and the fog that may have steered the other person to the series of decisions that led to that unfortunate outcome.

Just think of the Oscars. If you filled out one of those Oscar ballots at a home party, then you got to see in vivid detail that you weren’t as insightful as you thought. But if you’re at the same party and don’t fill one out, you may be tempted to think you would have guessed more winners than you actually would have. Once the envelope has been opened, we forget about the wrong answer and gravitate toward what we now know is the right one.

According to a recent study by Colin Camerer and Shinsuke Shimojo in the online journal Psychological Science, hindsight bias likely stems from the fact that when given new information, the brain tends to file away the old data and ignore it. Once we know the outcome of a decision or event, we can’t easily retrieve those now old and incorrect files, so we can’t accurately evaluate something after the fact.

So there you go—none of us is really that smart until we know the outcome of the event. Thus, you will continue to have football teams make the wrong plays, singers losing their tops (or at least claiming it was a mistake when they thought it would be a good idea at the time) and people like me on Bravo reality shows stepping in poop and then having it repeated on a loop 100 times over before they can scrape it off their metaphorical shoe.

So the next time you are tempted to tell somebody what they should have done in a situation that did not turn out well, put your hand on that person’s back and tell them the painful truth—”If I had been in that situation, I probably would have done the same thing too.”