Adam Grant Thinks Again
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These Two Questions Predict Your Ability to Predict the Future

Adam Grant

Jan 29
6

Predicting the future is hard. No one is right most of the time. But it’s possible to be wrong less often.

Last year, I launched a forecasting tournament with Good Judgment. From February through September, over 2,000 people registered their predictions on 25 different events, including:

  • Who would win the Olympic gold medal in women’s soccer/football?

  • How many confirmed COVID cases would Brazil have by July?

  • Would Jeff Bezos or Richard Branson get to space first?

Before the tournament started, 584 of the participants answered ten questions on their mental models that I developed for Think Again. We were able to predict their forecasting accuracy from how they answered the full set of questions. But there were two questions that rose above the rest in differentiating the best forecasters. Here they are—how would you respond to them?

  1. I strongly believe that...

(a) To thine own self be true

(b) Great minds think alike

(c) Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds

(d) The best revenge is to prove others wrong

  1. I see my political views as…

(a) Tools for winning arguments

(b) Hunches to test

(c) Symbols of allegiance

(d) Elements of my identity

I designed these questions to assess your tendency to think like a preacher, prosecutor, politician, or scientist. In preacher mode, you’re proselytizing your own views. In prosecutor mode, you’re attacking someone else’s views. In politician mode, you only listen to people if they already agree with your views.

The best forecasters avoided those traps. They strongly believed that (c) foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds and saw their political views as (b) hunches to test.

If you picked both of those answers, on average, your forecasts were more than twice as accurate as people who only chose one—and more than three times as accurate as people who chose neither. You think like a scientist.

Thinking like a scientist doesn’t mean you have to own a microscope or buy a telescope (though I would enjoy it if you dressed up like Bill Nye on Fridays). It means you don’t let your ideas become your identity. You have the humility to know what you don’t know, the curiosity to question your convictions, and the intellectual integrity to seek out evidence that contradicts your assumptions and people who challenge your thought process.

People who thought like scientists made significantly fewer accuracy and calibration mistakes over the next seven months:

Why? The data showed that they updated their forecasts more often. When you think like a scientist, changing your mind isn’t a threat to your ego—it’s a moment of growth. It means you've learned something new.

People who rethought their forecasts more often had higher accuracy scores (r = .19).

On average, the winning forecaster had the mental flexibility to update his predictions a whopping 9.5 times per question. More on him in my next post.

In the meantime:

  • To find out if you think more like a preacher, prosecutor, or politician than a scientist, you can take the full ten questions here

  • To test and improve your forecasting skills, join one of the open tournaments on Good Judgment

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6 Comments

  • Ian Bremmer
    Writes GZERO World with Ian Bremmer
    Willingness to update our calls as soon as the data changes is at the cornerstone of Eurasia Group's analysis. Glad to see this bears out more generally.
    • 13w
  • Paul Thoma
    Did you intentionally write 1C to be a little bit pejorative? I found that a little out of place. It might, for example, cause a person to go with (a) when they'd otherwise go with (c).
    • 15w
    • Edited
    2 Replies
  • Brad Berger
    Let's all help kids have better lives and teach them FREE Wisdom in schools aimhighteentips.com grades 5-12 We can improve the lives of the next generations easily with great Wisdom, 1 Tip daily in schools. Thank you for caring.
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    • 15w
  • Francesco Buzzi
    A lot of study, like Tetlock's studies, shows that the knowledge is not a factor for better predictions. I can imagine that a scientific mind could be more analytic and realistic, but maybe it's not enaugh, especially for complex system. Am i wrong?
    • 13w
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