Why are individuals not able to make future predictions accurately?

Name:
Prof. Qisi Zhang
356:156 (EAD II)
Date:
Why are individuals not able to make future predictions accurately?
To make better decisions it is necessary for people to be more analytical and merely rely on intuition and what the experts claim. Predictions about future behavior and events often fails when there are cognitive biases, which affects how they interpret their emotions and reactions about future events. This requires that people reevaluate their assumptions and even seek the opinions of others who may be more informed. Daniel Kahneman in The Surety of Fools cautions against fast-thinking (intuition) and people placing too much confidence on their own judgments unless there has been independent evaluation of the reasons and decisions. In Reporting live from tomorrow, Daniel Gilbert argues that it is better to learn about the future events from other people who experience what people want know, as people often imagine and invent information. However, much of what people do not learn is often right and others may not have the right information. Predicting with accuracy the magnitude of the change, which are likely generated when certain decisions are made depends on many variables and perceptions about the future events. Prediction errors affect the ability of individuals to make accurate predictions when they rely on inadequate information, fast thinking and make wrong assumptions about the future based on the past, and the present.
To make better predictions and learn about the future, there is a need to get more relevant and accurate information to base decisions. “The obvious best guess about how he would do in training, or in combat, was that he would be as effective as he had been at the wall” (Kahneman 216). In evaluation for possible fit for the future, evaluators often use the present to gauge the future. However, projecting the present to the future is based on the assumption that today’s performance will likely mirror the future performance, but even with what people consider objective evaluations, the evaluation is partly guesswork. There is a need to understand the limits of predictions since then expressing skepticism allows forecasters to evaluate the usefulness of the data. “One of the benefits of being a social and linguistic animal is that we can capitalize on the experience of others rather than trying to figure everything out for ourselves” (Gilbert 179). Nowadays, people know more than people in the past because there is access to information and they learn from those more knowledgeable. However, when there is information that is linked to imagination this often results in loss of objectivity when making predictions, highlighting the need to think about the present even when making future predictions. In many instances, what we know is based on the information from another person or someone else and one need not have witnessed something to know about it. People often get predictions wrong when they rely on the present feelings and because of inaccurate memories where people rely on both the past and the present to make predictions. In forecasting about the future events, people may make predictions that are too extreme since they overemphasize or igno...