{"id":3366,"date":"2012-06-28T11:48:37","date_gmt":"2012-06-28T14:48:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/news.cos.ucf.edu\/?p=3366"},"modified":"2012-06-28T11:48:37","modified_gmt":"2012-06-28T14:48:37","slug":"political-science-forecasts-are-predictably-unpredictable","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sciences.ucf.edu\/news\/political-science-forecasts-are-predictably-unpredictable\/","title":{"rendered":"Political-Science forecasts are predictably unpredictable"},"content":{"rendered":"

This is a guest post by\u00a0David Houghton, who is an associate professor of political science at the University of Central Florida and can be reached at David.Houghton@ucf.edu.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Social scientists just can\u2019t help making predictions, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that we\u2019re likely to be wrong.\u00a0A few years ago, political psychologist Philip Tetlock found during a decades-long study that \u201cexperts\u201d with Ph.D.s are no better than a monkey throwing darts at predicting what will happen in the social, economic and political arenas. Indeed, he suggested, the monkey may even be better than we are.<\/p>\n

Political scientists who ought to know much better \u2013 myself included \u2013 often make rash predictions.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year \u2013 during a particularly volatile point in tensions between Tel Aviv, Israel, and Tehran, Iran \u2013 I was interviewed on Orlando\u2019s Fox 35 morning show and boldly predicted that by this fall Israel would probably attack Iran\u2019s nuclear sites.<\/p>\n

Not long after, though, the political landscape changed; the Obama administration jump-started negotiations on the nuclear issue in a way that has so far staved off an Israeli missile attack, and made it publicly known that cyberattacks on nuclear sites in Tehran had delayed Iran\u2019s ability to enrich the uranium necessary to produce a nuclear bomb.\u00a0Of course, it\u2019s still quite possible that an Israeli attack could take place. But if I were right \u2013 and I sincerely hope I am not \u2013 I will have been right by mistake, based on incomplete information available at the time, which happened to lead to the eventual conclusion.\u00a0In reality, any attack by Israel on Iran is predictably unpredictable.\u00a0The Central Intelligence Agency is not any better at this. Recall that the CIA did not predict earth-shattering events such as the Islamic revolution in Iran, the end of the Cold War or the events of 9\/11.<\/p>\n

Why does this happen? Part of it probably has to do with the way our minds operate after an event to render those unpredictable and unlikely events as somehow foreseeable in retrospect, what psychologists call \u201chindsight bias.\u201d\u00a0But there is also a deeper reason: Simply put, the social world may well be inherently unpredictable. Although legions of economists, sociologists and political scientists still believe that there are underlying \u201claws\u201d that govern their respective disciplines, relatively few such regularities have ever been found.<\/p>\n

In their place, we instead have theories.\u00a0As essayist Nicholas Naseem Taleb writes it in his book Fooled By Randomness, if economists could make reliable predictions about the economic world, far more of them would be rich by now. As a former stock market speculator, he knows what he is talking about.\u00a0The social world is fraught with intangibles, shifting variables, unintended consequences, unforeseen changes and freak effects.<\/p>\n

To appreciate the perils of prediction, take the recent presidential elections in Egypt.\u00a0During the first half of the year, The New York Times \u2013 usually considered one of the most authoritative sources of international news in the United States \u2013 was filled with articles discussing the fight between two supposed \u201cfront runners\u201d in the campaign, Amr Moussa and Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, an establishment military figure versus a renegade \u201cliberal\u201d Islamist.\u00a0Neither came close to winning. Instead, two candidates pretty much written off by everyone in the West \u2013 Ahmed Shafik and Mohamed Morsi \u2013 finished at the top in the first round of voting.\u00a0In the runoff earlier this month, Morsi apparently won with just over 50 percent of the vote, but even that final outcome wasn\u2019t announced by Egypt\u2019s election commission until Monday. Pretty much nobody predicted all of this except, perhaps, Morsi himself. He was very often written off by pundits as \u201cuncharismatic\u201d and \u201clacking in support,\u201d and other Islamists were thought a much better bet.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Making predictions was especially ill-advised in this case. For one thing, nobody really knows even today whether the first round results represented the true will of the Egyptian people. No reliable U.S.-style opinion polls were permitted in advance, which means that on-the-ground reporters were forced to rely on impressionist accounts of \u201cthe will of the people,\u201d a sort of Egyptian \u201cDewey Wins.\u201d<\/p>\n

Former President Carter said that the Carter Center was denied access to many voting sites and so could not make a reliable determination as to the election\u2019s fairness.<\/p>\n

Many voters clearly believed that the first round was at least partially rigged: Mubarek\u2019s own former prime minister (Shafik) almost wins after a revolution to topple Mubarek? One of the apparently weakest Islamic candidates actually tops the poll?<\/p>\n

For many ordinary Egyptians, it didn\u2019t pass the sniff test. Morsi\u2019s win suggests that if the military rigged it in the second round, they didn\u2019t do much of a job.<\/p>\n

But whether it was fixed, predicting the vote in a country holding the first meaningful presidential election in its history was always going to be well-nigh impossible \u2013 as is the case in forecasting all the social sciences.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is a guest post by\u00a0David Houghton, who is an associate professor of political science at the University of Central Florida and can be reached at David.Houghton@ucf.edu. Social scientists just can\u2019t help making predictions, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that we\u2019re likely to be wrong.\u00a0A few years ago, political psychologist Philip Tetlock found […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":3369,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[13,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","category-political-science-departments"],"yoast_head":"\nPolitical-Science forecasts are predictably unpredictable - College of Sciences News<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sciences.ucf.edu\/news\/political-science-forecasts-are-predictably-unpredictable\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Political-Science forecasts are predictably unpredictable - College of Sciences News\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"This is a guest post by\u00a0David Houghton, who is an associate professor of political science at the University of Central Florida and can be reached at David.Houghton@ucf.edu. 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