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Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?
By Philip E. Tetlock

Winner of the 2006 Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order
Winner of the 2006 Woodrow Wilson Foundation Award, American Political Science Association
Winner of the 2006 Robert E. Lane Award, Political Psychology Section, American Political Science Association

Philip Tetlock, a University of California, Berkeley, professor of business administration and political science, earned the prize (2008) for ideas he set forth in his 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?"
A great many political forecasts turn out to be inaccurate, which is troubling since government officials routinely rely on them to make decisions, Tetlock says.
In a 20-year study of 27,000 predictions by 284 political experts, Tetlock found those who take a big-picture approach are more often correct than those who operate from a single perspective. However, all political “experts” who do forecasts need to receive more training, do more research and be held publicly accountable for their advice, he says.
Award judges called the book “a landmark study that changes our understanding of the way experts perform when they make judgments about world politics.”
The work was selected from among 50 entries from seven countries.

"This book is a landmark in both content and style of argument. It is a major advance in our understanding of expert judgment in the vitally important and almost impossible task of political and strategic forecasting. Tetlock also offers a unique example of even-handed social science. This may be the first book I have seen in which the arguments and objections of opponents are presented with as much care as the author's own position. - Daniel Kahneman, Princeton University, recipient of the 2002 Nobel Prize in economic sciences
Before anyone turns an ear to the panels of pundits, they might do well to obtain a copy of Phillip Tetlock's new book Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? The Berkeley psychiatrist has apparently made a 20-year study of predictions by the sorts who appear as experts on TV and get quoted in newspapers and found that they are no better than the rest of us at prognostication.--Jim Coyle, Toronto Star
Tetlock uses science and policy to brilliantly explore what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events and to examine why experts are often wrong in their forecasts.--Choice
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Philip E. Tetlock

Philip E. Tetlock is Leonore Annenberg University Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. He has also written several non-fiction books on politics, including Counterfactual Thought Experiments in World Politics (with Aaron Belkin; 1996) and "Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know?".

His Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? (2005) describes a twenty-year study in which 284 experts in many fields, from professors to journalists, and with many opinions, from Marxists to free-marketers, 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 which was the recipient of the 2008 University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order. Dr. 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" (two personality types identified in The Hedgehog and the Fox).

In 2000 Tetlock was awarded the NAS Award for Behavior Research Relevant to the Prevention of Nuclear War from the National Academy of Sciences.