Outfoxing the Pundits

The National Interest
May 5, 2012
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/outfoxing-the-pundits-6854?page=show

In his groundbreaking study Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?, Philip Tetlock employs the research done by psychologists, neuroscientists and game theorists to show how we make political decisions. The fundamental properties of the human mind—preference for simplicity, aversion to ambiguity and dissonance, belief in a controllable world, misunderstanding of probability theory—lead us to rely on narratives, the simple story lines that integrate and interpret information, both making sense of complex realities and trying to predict the future. Understanding how such narratives are used in politics sheds light on the biggest foreign-policy calamities of our times.
Not Outfoxed