Tilbageligning

Tilbageligning is a term used in Danish-language scholarship to describe the cognitive and rhetorical process of aligning current interpretations, decisions, or narratives with past events or outcomes. The term is not widely standardized and appears mainly in discussions of memory, decision making, and narrative identity, where it denotes a retrospective adjustment of meaning to fit earlier experiences.

Origin and sense: The word combines tilbage, meaning back, with ligning, meaning likeness or alignment, signaling a movement of bringing past experience into current coherence. The concept can be explicit or unconscious and may contribute to coherence in personal narratives or to biases in judgment.

Usage and implications: In psychology and communication studies, tilbageligning is used to analyze how people reinterpret past events to justify present choices or to maintain a consistent self-story. It is related to, but distinct from nostalgia (affective longing for the past) and hindsight bias (overestimating predictability after the fact).

Examples: A manager who emphasizes lessons learned from a failed project to justify a current strategy demonstrates tilbageligning. A memoirist who reinterprets earlier actions to align with a later self-portrait may also engage in tilbageligning.

See also: hindsight bias, retrospective cognition, memory reconstruction, narrative identity, coherence seeking.