What kind of people are most skilled at predicting the future?

Predicting the future is not for fortune tellers.

As human beings, one of the skills that makes us unique is our ability to predict the future. 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 us to finish a report, but we can also try to make predictions about who will win a soccer match or how likely we are to like a university course. At the end of the day, it's just a matter of using the knowledge we have gained from experience and projecting it into the future.

In this skill, as in all skills, there are people who have an easier time guessing what will happen in the future, and know what kind of profiles will be most likely to be the most likely to win in the future. what kind of profiles These individuals may reveal information about the mechanisms that guide their success in imagining probable future situations. For this reason, a team of researchers has set out to understand the typical profile of these "prediction champions" and to estimate what kind of practices and habits related to the projection of knowledge into the future could be generalized to the entire population.

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

Studying "elite guessers".

This team of researchers was concerned with establishing relationships between the scores obtained in prediction tests and other aspects related to different cognitive abilities and thinking styles. To do this, they started from the type of answers that several people provided to questions about aspects unrelated to their daily lives, such as:

The different participants were tasked with estimating the probabilities of each of the options occurring, and their scores on their ability to predict future events were established by cross-referencing their answers with actual events that occurred over the months.

Who were more able to predict the future?

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

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

In addition, people with good predictive skills tend to look for stimulating situations in search of intellectual challenges. 

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 be mutually empowering as they find pleasure in discussion and argumentation and take steps to demonstrate their knowledge and test others' level of preparedness.

In conclusion

It is possible that part of these results is due more to the type of personalities that have an easier time finding themselves in contexts where practicing predictive skills is important (being a brokerbeing part of a political consultancy, etc.), or they may actually tell us about the psychological patterns that have an impact on how well they perform in this particular task.

As always, correlation does not imply causation, correlation does not imply causation. However, it does not hurt to keep researching about this or, at least, to be encouraged to estimate a date when we already have a definitive answer.

• Who will be the president of Russia in 2012?
• Will North Korea detonate another nuclear weapon in the next 3 months?
  • People with greater ability in predicting geopolitical events tend to show a higher IQ score than the average. IQ score higher than the average of the population.
  • People with higher crystallized intelligence in relevant aspects (general semantics, broad knowledge about the current world, etc.) also score better on prediction tests. also score better on prediction tests..
  • They are They are more likely to show a flexible type of thinking, which adapts to improvisation.They are more likely to show a flexible type of thinking, adapting to improvisation and adjusting well to the occurrence of small unforeseen events, rather than remaining wedded to dogmatic positions.
  • They think in a deterministicThey believe that things happen for explainable reasons, not through fate or mysterious esoteric events. This makes sense, considering 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 is to be predicted.
Bibliographical 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.