Expert Political Judgment

Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? is a 2005 book by Philip E. Tetlock (The newer edition of the book was published in 2017). Philip E. Tetlock is a Canadian-American political science writer, and is currently the Annenberg University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is cross-appointed at the Wharton School and the School of Arts and Sciences.

The book notes how political experts are often no more accurate at making political predictions than most people, and in instances where they are wrong, they are rarely held accountable. The book analyzed which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. APA PsycNet notes that Tetlock shows that there is a "perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgment and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits - the single minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat."

Tetlock co-authored the 2016 book Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction.

Book overview

Princeton University Press summary of the book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?

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Since its original publication, Expert Political Judgment by New York Times bestselling author Philip Tetlock has established itself as a contemporary classic in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. Tetlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems. He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat. Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging expert decision-making. Now with a new preface in which Tetlock discusses the latest research in the field, the book explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts.

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Reviews of Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?

Journal articles

The abstract for the 2008 journal article Review of: Philip E. Tetlock. 2005. Expert Political Judgment: How Good is it? How Can We Know? published in the journal SSRN Electronic Journal indicates:

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The book assaults common sense with evidence. In order to mount his assault on accepted wisdom, Tetlock spends some 238 pages of text explaining his methods and findings, and considering and refuting many alternative explanations, and adds some 75 pages of technical appendices. The downside of this approach is that some readers may find the book too demanding. That would be a pity as his findings are important. Tetlock’s book reports the results of a two-decade long study of expert predictions. He recruited 284 people whose professions included "commenting or offering advice on political and economic trends." He asked them to forecast the probability that various situations would or would not occur, picking areas (geographic and substantive) within and outside their areas of expertise. In addition to eliciting forecasts, Tetlock also asked questions aimed at understanding how the forecasters came to formulate their forecasts, how they dealt with the failure of their forecasts, how they responded to contradictory information, and how they evaluated the probable accuracy of others' theories and predictions. By 2003, he had accumulated 82,361 forecasts, which provided him a database to evaluate. He then evaluated experts' predictions against outcomes, and against various alternate predictions that he derived from simple statistical procedures, from uninformed non-experts, and from well-informed non-experts.

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• Expert political judgement: How good is it? How can we know?, APA PsycNet, American Psychological Association

Other book reviews

• Everybody’s an Expert:Putting predictions to the test by Louis Menand, The New Yorker, 2005

Videos of Philip Tetlock speaking about the book Expert Political Judgment

• Videos of Philip Tetlock speaking about the book Expert Political Judgment - video playlist

Book editions

• Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? - New Edition by Philip E. Tetlock. ‎Princeton University Press; Revised edition (August 29, 2017)
• Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? by Philip E. Tetlock. Princeton University Press; New Ed edition (August 20, 2006)

See also

• Political science
• Forecasting