“Behavioral Scientists and Laypeople Misestimate Societal Effects of COVID-19”, Cendri Hutcherson, Constantine Sharpinskyi, Michael Varnum, Amanda Rotella, Alexandra Wormley, Louis Tay, Igor Grossmann2021-03-26 (, , ; backlinks; similar)⁠:

[cf. Tetlock, Risi et al 2019] Effective management of global crises relies on expert judgment of their societal effects. How accurate are such judgments?

In the spring of 2020, we asked behavioral scientists (n = 717) and lay Americans (n = 394) to make predictions about COVID-19 pandemic-related societal change across social and psychological domains. Six months later we obtained retrospective assessments for the same domains (Nscientists = 270; NlayPeople = 411). Scientists and lay people were equally inaccurate in judging COVID’s impact, both in prospective predictions and retrospective assessments. Across studies and samples, estimates of the magnitude of change were off by more than 20% and less than half of participants accurately predicted the direction of changes. Critically, these insights go against public perceptions of behavioral scientists’ ability to forecast such changes (n = 203): behavioral scientists were considered most likely to accurately predict societal change and most sought after for recommendations across a wide range of professions.

Taken together, we find that behavioral scientists and lay people fared poorly at predicting the societal consequences of the pandemic and misperceive what effects it may have already had.

Figure 1: Prospective (April 2020) and retrospective (October/November 2020) judgment of societal change along with objective markers (dotted line) behavioral scientists and lay people. We included behavioral scientists from both Studies 1 and 2 because their forecasts were largely the same (see Table S10). Error bars indicate 95% confidence interval.