Purpose

We are interested in investigating how people make forecasting decisions about future events, and how they decide to vote on and use social features like our comment section or Bluesky algorithm.

Note on the use of deception

No deception is used in this study.

Rationale

Many people make judgments about the future, as it relates to current events, pop culture, or other areas of interest. For the purposes in our lab, we were interested to see people’s ability in these decisions, and how they relate to various psychological factors. For instance, would being good at forecasting mean that you prefer a social media algorithm that is strictly based on merit? We seek to understand similar questions.

Below are a couple readings that concern these concepts if you would like to know more.

• Tetlock, P. E., & Gardner, D. (2016). Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction. Crown.
• Atanasov, P., Rescober, P., Stone, E., Swift, S. A., Servan-Schreiber, E., Tetlock, P., Ungar, L., & Mellers, B. (2017). Distilling the Wisdom of Crowds: Prediction Markets vs. Prediction Polls. Management Science, 63(3), 691–706.https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2015.2374