Why You’re So Bad at Predicting the Future
And five ways to outsmart your own mental biases
It’s human nature to attempt to conceptualize the future. All civilizations, from the ancient to the modern, have had some tradition of divination or fortune telling; these days, we have data and statistical models to give us some insight into what’s to come. But left to our own devices, most of us are really bad at predicting what will happen—and that’s a consequence of the wiring of the human brain.
Collectively, the thought patterns that affect the way we think, make decisions, and interact with other people are known as cognitive biases. Many of these biases also distort our perceptions of what will happen — in elections, in the economy, and in our everyday lives — whether we’re looking ahead by 50 years or 50 minutes.
It’s not all bad news, according to Don Moore, a professor of organizational behavior at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. “To listen to psychologists like me talk about the way people fall short of perfect rationality, it’s easy to come away with a depressing message,” he says. “But you can also see the glass as half-full.” Humans are far from perfect at this, but we’re still the best future-predictors on the planet. “Yeah, we don’t do a perfect job of calculating future benefits and losses. On the other hand, we’re…
