Guessing the Future

For John, BLUF:  There is a lot we don't understand about the COVID-19 Pandemic.  It would be smart to learn some of those things, to avoid future mistakes.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Everyone Was Wrong on the Pandemic’s Societal Impact

Here is the sub-headline:

In March 2020, a study asked experts and laypeople for their predictions. Neither group came close to being right.

From Foreign Policy, by Messrs Michael Varnum, Cendri Hutcherson and Igor Grossmann, 18 March 2021, 2:40 PM.

Here is the lede plus three:

Soon after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was clear to many that life was about to be fundamentally altered, possibly irrevocably.  Discussions of a “new normal” spread on social media, in the popular press, and in scholarly publications, but it was unclear just what this new normal might look like.  Beyond social distancing or working and learning from home, how would COVID-19 change our ways of thinking and behaving?  Would depression and loneliness increase, or would people prove resilient and adaptable?  Would relationships suffer as couples spent more time together?  Would people become more open to cultural change as they were forced to adapt, or would they fall back on tradition and ritual?

In those uncertain early days, pundits, politicians, and celebrities alike offered their predictions and prescriptions.  So too did some behavioral and social scientists. For us, a group of scholars who share an interest in understanding how social and behavioral science can best inform public policy, it was a golden opportunity to test just how expert experts are.  In a large-scale undertaking beginning last April, we sought to track the extent to which social and behavioral scientists (including social and clinical psychologists, experts in judgments and decision-making, neuroscientists, economists, and political scientists) accurately predicted the impacts of COVID-19 on a set of psychological and behavioral domains—ranging from life satisfaction and loneliness to prejudice and violent crimes—in the United States.  We also asked average Americans to make these predictions as well.  Half a year later, we assessed the accuracy of these predictions.

So, how did COVID-19 reshape people’s psychology?  Surprisingly, a steady stream of research findings suggest that far less has changed than one might expect. Loneliness, if it increased at all, did so by a minuscule amount.  People’s satisfaction with relationships decreased, but the trend was again very small, a far cry from the dramatic change people were predicting last March.  And people’s basic social motivations—to affiliate, or achieve status, or find romantic partners, or care for family—also showed little movement in response to the pandemic.  In a National Science Foundation-funded study involving more than 15,000 research participants around the globe, only the motivation to avoid infectious disease showed a meaningful shift from pre-pandemic baselines.  Unsurprisingly, it increased.  Other ways of assessing change provide a similar picture.  Using survey data from large, nationally representative samples, we found that there was little to no change in 10 diverse domains of human psychology and behavior—ranging from subjective well-being to traditionalism—that might have been expected to show dramatic movement.

These findings were unexpected by many, including the experts in human behavior and social dynamics in our studies, whose predictions turned out to be generally inaccurate.  The majority of forecasts were off by at least 20 percent, and fewer than half of our participants correctly predicted the direction of changes.  In what ways were these predictions off? Typically they were too extreme.  In other words, human psychology and behavior showed more inertia than most of our participants anticipated.  The only exception came in the domain of violent crime, where a 20 percent increase was observed from spring to late fall.  Ironically, this was a domain where our participants predicted almost no change.  How did experts compare with the average person?  Surprisingly, our experts performed no better than the laypeople in our control group, making nearly identical (and equally inaccurate) predictions for the pandemic’s effects on a wide range of phenomena.  Even more nuanced measures of expertise, such as an individual’s amount of social science training or experience studying the specific phenomenon being predicted, did not show any relationship to accuracy.

Here is an interesting comment.  It turns out that those who go against the grain of commonly accepted wisdom do better at forecasting:

How can we become better forecasters?  Here, [Philip] Tetlock’s work on so-called superforecasters, individuals who make highly accurate forecasts, might be informative.  Superforecasters seem to reason differently from others.  They are more willing to acknowledge uncertainty, to seek out opposing viewpoints, and to update their beliefs in the face of new evidence.  Studies suggest that similar reasoning strategies make people better at forecasting their own future emotions and that training in taking the viewpoint of a detached observer can enhance the likelihood this kind of thinking.  Further, recent work by Tetlock and his collaborators has shown that a short training in probabilistic reasoning improves people’s ability to forecast geopolitical events.

There is still a lot to learn in the field of social science, although the desired outcomes from different groups may get in the way of that learning  Some truths may be culturally determined.

Regards  —  Cliff