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Expert Political Judgment
Tetlock's 2005 landmark documenting two decades of expert predictions scored against outcomes — revealing that credentialed forecasters perform no better than chance and that confidence inversely correlates with accuracy.
Published by Princeton University Press in 2005, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? presented the results of Tetlock's twenty-year study tracking 28,000 predictions from 284 political scientists, economists, and intelligence analysts. The central finding — that expert forecasts were no more accurate than random guessing — challenged the authority of expertise itself. More consequentially, the book identified a small minority of forecasters who consistently outperformed everyone else, and documented the cognitive habits distinguishing them: thinking in probabilities, updating frequently, seeking disconfirmation, and resisting identity-protective reasoning. The book introduced the fox-hedgehog framework as an empirical predictor of forecasting accuracy.
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The study's design was elegant in its rigor. Tetlock asked experts to make specific, falsifiable predictions about geopolitical events: Would the Soviet Union use force to retain its Baltic states? Would Quebec secede from Canada? Would the European Union expand eastward? Each prediction required a probability estimate and a time horizon. Each was scored