Philip E. Tetlock

Who is Philip E. Tetlock?

Philip E. Tetlock is Leonore Annenberg University Professor of Psychology and Management at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also written several non-fiction books on political psychology, including Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics and Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? Tetlock is also co-leader of the Good Judgment Project, a multi-year study of crowd-sourcing forecasts of world events.

His Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? describes a twenty-year study in which 284 experts in many fields, including government officials, professors, journalists, and other, and with many opinions, from Marxists to free-marketeers, were asked to make 28,000 predictions about the future, finding that they were only slightly more accurate than chance, and worse than basic computer algorithms. As a result of this work, he received the 2008 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Tetlock was awarded the Woodrow Wilson Award for best book published on government, politics, or international affairs and Robert E. Lane Award for best book in political psychology, both from American Political Science Association in 2005. Forecasters with the biggest news media profiles were especially bad. The study also compared the records of "foxes" and "hedgehogs".