Hutcherson, Cendri A., Sharpinskyi, Konstantyn, Varnum, Michael E. W., Rotella, Amanda, Wormley, Alexandra S., Tay, Louis and Grossmann, Igor (2023) On the Accuracy, Media Representation, and Public Perception of Psychological Scientists’ Judgments of Societal Change. American Psychologist. ISSN 0003-066X (In Press)
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Hutcherson_2023_Pandemic_Predictions_final.pdf - Accepted Version Download (5MB) | Preview |
Abstract
At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychological scientists frequently made on-the-record predictions in public media about how individuals and society would change. Such predictions were often made outside these scientists’ areas of expertise, with justifications based on intuition, heuristics, and analogical reasoning (Study 1; N = 719 statements). How accurate are these kinds of judgments regarding societal change? In Study 2, we obtained predictions from scientists (N = 717) and lay Americans (N = 394) in Spring 2020 regarding the direction of change for a range of social and psychological phenomena. We compared them to objective data obtained at 6 months and 1 year. To further probe how experience impacts such judgments, 6 months later (Study 3), we obtained retrospective judgments of societal change for the same domains (Nscientists = 270; Nlaypeople = 411). Bayesian analysis suggested greater credibility of the null hypothesis that scientists’ judgments were at chance on average for both prospective and retrospective judgments. Moreover, neither domain-general expertise (i.e., judgmental accuracy of scientists compared to laypeople) nor self-identified domain-specific expertise improved accuracy. In a follow-up study on meta-accuracy (Study 4), we show that the public nevertheless expects psychological scientists to make more accurate predictions about individual and societal change compared to most other scientific disciplines, politicians, and nonscientists, and they prefer to follow their recommendations. These findings raise questions about the role psychological scientists could and should play in helping the public and policymakers plan for future events.
| Item Type: | Article |
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| Additional Information: | Funding information: This work was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant 435-2016-1274 (to Cendri A. Hutcherson), the National Science Foundation Grant 2026854 (to Michael E. W. Varnum), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant 435-2014-0685 and Early Researcher Award ER16-12-169 from the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation (both to Igor Grossmann). The authors gratefully acknowledge Alden Lai and the Gallup-Wellness for Planet Earth Global Wellbeing Initiative for providing estimates for well-being, Giving Tuesday for providing estimates for charity domains, and Lynn Vavreck and the Nationscape initiative for providing data on political polarization. The authors have no known conflicts of interest to disclose. |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | scientific intuitions, science communication, COVID-19, forecasting, lay theories of change |
| Subjects: | C800 Psychology |
| Department: | Faculties > Health and Life Sciences > Psychology |
| Related URLs: | |
| Depositing User: | Rachel Branson |
| Date Deposited: | 06 Feb 2023 11:46 |
| Last Modified: | 10 May 2023 11:00 |
| URI: | https://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/id/eprint/51321 |
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