As human beings, one of the skills that makes us unique is the ability to predict the future . Not with exact results, of course, but quite accurately: it is relatively easy for us to estimate the number of days it will take to finish a report, but we can also try to make predictions about who will win a football match or about the chances of liking a university career. In the end, it’s just a matter of using our own knowledge from experience and projecting it into the future.

In this skill, as in all, there are people who have an easier time getting it right about what will happen in the future, and knowing what kind of profiles these individuals have could reveal information about the mechanisms that guide success in imagining probable future situations. For this reason, a team of researchers has set out to find out the typical profile of these “prediction champions” and to estimate what kind of practices and habits related to projecting knowledge into the future could be generalized to the entire population.

Their conclusions have been recently published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science .

Studying “elite fortune tellers”

This team of researchers established relationships between the scores obtained in the prediction test and other aspects related to different cognitive skills and thinking styles. To do this, they started from the type of answers that several people gave to questions about aspects that were not part of their daily lives, such as

  1. How fast will China’s economy grow in the next quarter?
  2. Who will be the president of Russia in 2012?
  3. Will North Korea detonate another nuclear weapon in the next 3 months?

The different participants were responsible for estimating the probabilities of each of the options occurring, and their scores about the ability to predict future events were established by cross-checking their responses with the actual events that occurred over the months.

Who were most able to predict the future?

The results obtained show two trends related to basic cognitive abilities :

  • People with greater ability to predict geopolitical events tend to show a score of IQ higher than the average of the population.
  • People with greater intelligence crystallised in relevant aspects (general semantics, broad knowledge of the current world, etc.) also obtain better scores in the prediction tests .

In addition, people with greater ability to know what will happen in the future show some tendencies about their way of thinking and relating:

  • They are more inclined to show a flexible type of thinking , which adapts to improvisation and adjusts well to the appearance of small unexpected events, instead of remaining attached to dogmatic positions.
  • They think in a deterministic way : they believe that things happen for explainable reasons, not through fate or mysterious events typical of esotericism. This makes sense, bearing in mind that predicting the future is, in part, working with probabilities, and these depend on aspects that can be considered at a stage prior to the occurrence of what one wants to predict.

In addition, people with good predictive skills tend to seek out stimulating situations for intellectual challenge .

They tend to be thorough in their approach to these challenges and get emotionally involved in them, as well as showing a certain competitive spirit when it comes to comparing their results with those of other people. They generally like to involve other people in solving these challenges and may therefore encourage each other by finding pleasure in discussion and argument and taking steps to demonstrate their knowledge and test the level of preparedness of others.

By way of conclusion

It is possible that part of these results is due more to the type of personalities that have it easier to find themselves in contexts in which practicing predictive abilities are important (being a broker , being part of a political consultancy, etc:), or they may really tell us about the psychological patterns that affect good performance in this particular task.

As always, correlation does not imply causality . However, it is not superfluous to continue researching this, or at least to be encouraged to estimate a date when we already have a definitive answer.

Bibliographic references:

  • Mellers, B., Stone, E., Murray, T., Minster, A., Rohrbaugh, N., Bishop, M., … & Tetlock, P. (2015). Identifying and Cultivating Superforecasters as a Method of Improving Probabilistic Predictions. Perspectives on Psychological Science,10(3), pp. 267 – 281.