Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Good Judgment Project coleader Philip Tetlock is a Canadian American born in 1954. He is the Annenberg Professor at the University of Pennsylvania with appointments in Wharton, psychology, and political science. His research interests include the assessment of good judgment and the criteria used by social scientists to evaluate judgment and define error and bias.

Prior to embarking on the Good Judgment Project with his partner Barbara Mellers and writing Superforecasting, Tetlock made his name with the 2005 publication Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? This work drew upon Tetlock’s research between 1980 and 2003, which staged forecasting tournaments for 284 experts including academics and government officials of diverse political persuasions. The results, which showed that these specialists’ predictions were no more reliably accurate than a dart-throwing chimp and performed worse than their lower-status colleagues, indicated the grand scale of mediocrity in American political forecasting. The idea that non-experts could outperform experts at forecasting is also explored in detail in Superforecasting through the theme of Hedgehogs and Foxes.

These findings paved the way for the founding of the Good Judgment Project and ignited Tetlock’s fascination with superforecasters—the non-experts whose modes of thinking are conducive to accurate forecasts.