Insights into the accuracy of social scientists' forecasts of societal change.

ABSTRACT: How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing the accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment on social media, and gender-career and racial bias. After we provided them with historical trend data on the relevant domain, social scientists submitted pre-registered monthly forecasts for a year (Tournament 1; N = 86 teams and 359 forecasts), with an opportunity to update forecasts on the basis of new data six months later (Tournament 2; N = 120 teams and 546 forecasts). Benchmarking forecasting accuracy revealed that social scientists' foreca

SUBMITTER: Forecasting Collaborative 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10192018 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature