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Since its original publication, Expert Political Judgment by New York Times bestselling author Philip Tetlock has established itself as a contemporary classic in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. etlock first discusses arguments about whether the world is too complex for people to find the tools to understand political phenomena, let alone predict the future. He evaluates predictions from experts in different fields, comparing them to predictions by well-informed laity or those based on simple extrapolation from current trends. He goes on to analyze which styles of thinking are more successful in forecasting. Classifying thinking styles using Isaiah Berlin's prototypes of the fox and the hedgehog, Tetlock contends that the fox--the thinker who knows many little things, draws from an eclectic array of traditions, and is better able to improvise in response to changing events--is more successful in predicting the future than the hedgehog, who knows one big thing, toils devotedly within one tradition, and imposes formulaic solutions on ill-defined problems. He notes a perversely inverse relationship between the best scientific indicators of good judgement and the qualities that the media most prizes in pundits--the single-minded determination required to prevail in ideological combat. Clearly written and impeccably researched, the book fills a huge void in the literature on evaluating expert opinion. It will appeal across many academic disciplines as well as to corporations seeking to develop standards for judging expert decision-making. Now with a new preface in which Tetlock discusses the latest research in the field, the book explores what constitutes good judgment in predicting future events and looks at why experts are often wrong in their forecasts.

The study reported here assessed the impact of managers' philosophies of human nature on their reactions to influential academic claims and counter-claims of when human judgment is likely to stray from rational-actor standards and of how organizations can correct these biases. Managers evaluated scenarios that depicted decision-making processes at micro, meso, and macro levels of analysis: alleged cognitive biases of individuals, strategies of structuring and coping with accountability relationships between supervisors and employees, and strategies that corporate entities use to cope with accountability demands from the broader society. Political ideology and cognitive style emerged as consistent predictors of the value spins that managers placed on decisions at all three levels of analysis. Specifically, conservative managers with strong preferences for cognitive closure were most likely (a) to defend simple heuristic-driven errors such as overattribution and overconfidence and to warn of the mirror-image mistakes of failing to hold people accountable and of diluting sound policies with irrelevant side-objectives; (b) to be skeptical of complex strategies of structuring or coping with accountability and to praise those who lay down clear rules and take decisive stands; (c) to prefer simple philosophies of corporate governance (the shareholder over stakeholder model) and to endorse organizational norms such as hierarchical filtering that reduce cognitive overload on top management by short-circuiting unnecessary argumentation. Intuitive theories of good judgment apparently cut across levels of analysis and are deeply grounded in personal epistemologies and political ideologies.