title: Psychological strategies for winning a geopolitical forecasting tournament.
abstract: Five university-based research groups competed to recruit forecasters, elicit their predictions, and aggregate those predictions to assign the most accurate probabilities to events in a 2-year geopolitical forecasting tournament. Our group tested and found support for three psychological drivers of accuracy: training, teaming, and tracking. Probability training corrected cognitive biases, encouraged forecasters to use reference classes, and provided forecasters with heuristics, such as averaging when multiple estimates were available. Teaming allowed forecasters to share information and discuss the rationales behind their beliefs. Tracking placed the highest performers (top 2% from Year 1) in elite teams that worked together. Results showed that probability training, team collaboration, and tracking improved both calibration and resolution. Forecasting is often viewed as a statistical problem, but forecasts can be improved with behavioral interventions. Training, teaming, and tracking are psychological interventions that dramatically increased the accuracy of forecasts. Statistical algorithms (reported elsewhere) improved the accuracy of the aggregation. Putting both statistics and psychology to work produced the best forecasts 2 years in a row.
authors.affiliation: 1Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania.
authors.forename: Barbara
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Mellers
authors.forename: Lyle
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ungar
authors.forename: Jonathan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Baron
authors.forename: Jaime
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Ramos
authors.forename: Burcu
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Gurcay
authors.forename: Katrina
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Fincher
authors.forename: Sydney E
authors.initials: SE
authors.lastname: Scott
authors.forename: Don
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Moore
authors.forename: Pavel
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Atanasov
authors.forename: Samuel A
authors.initials: SA
authors.lastname: Swift
authors.forename: Terry
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Murray
authors.forename: Eric
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Stone
authors.forename: Philip E
authors.initials: PE
authors.lastname: Tetlock
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D015982:Bias; D005260:Female; D005544:Forecasting; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D011336:Probability; D011580:Psychological Techniques / Q000193:education*; D012919:Social Behavior
keywords: decision making; forecast; judgment; prediction; social interaction