What Type Of People Are Most Skilled At Predicting The Future?
As human beings, one of the abilities that makes us unique is the possibility of predicting the future Not with exact results, of course, but with enough precision: it is relatively easy for us to estimate the number of days it will take us to finish a report, but we can also try to establish predictions about who will win a soccer match or about the chances of that we are going to like a university career. In the end, it is just a matter of using knowledge from experience and project them towards the future.
In this skill, as in all, there are people who have it easier when it comes to guessing what will happen in the future, and knowing what kind of profiles These individuals present could reveal information about the mechanisms that guide success when imagining probable future situations. For this reason, a team of researchers has set out to know the typical profile of these “prediction champions” and estimate what type of practices and habits related to the projection of knowledge into the future could be generalized to the entire population.
Their conclusions have been recently published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science.
This team of researchers was in charge of establishing relationships between the scores obtained in prediction tests and other aspects related to different cognitive abilities and thinking styles. To do this, we started from the type of answers that several people provided to questions about aspects outside their daily lives, such as:
How fast will China’s economy grow in the next quarter?
Who will be the president of Russia in 2012?
Will North Korea detonate another nuclear weapon in the next 3 months?
The different participants were in charge of estimating the probabilities of each of the options occurring, and their scores regarding the ability to predict future events were established by crossing their responses with the real events that occurred over the months.
Who was best able to predict the future?
The results obtained show two trends related to basic cognitive abilities:
Furthermore, people with a greater ability to know what will happen in the future show some tendencies about their way of thinking and relating:
Furthermore, people with good predictive skills tend to seek out stimulating situations in search of intellectual challenges
They tend to be thorough in the way they approach these challenges and become emotionally involved in them, in addition to showing a certain competitive spirit when comparing their results with those of other people. They generally like to involve other people in solving these challenges and may therefore enhance each other by finding pleasure in discussion and argument and taking steps to demonstrate their knowledge and test the level of preparation of others. .
In conclusion
It is possible that part of these results is due more to the type of personalities who find it easier to find themselves in contexts in which practicing prediction skills are important (being brokerbe part of a political consultancy, etc. :), or they may actually tell us about the psychological patterns that impact good performance in this specific task.
As usual, Correlation does not imply causation However, it doesn’t hurt to continue researching this or, at least, be encouraged to estimate a date when we already have a definitive answer.
