Philip E. Tetlock & Dan Gardner

American psychologist and political scientist, co-author of Superforecasting, whose research revealed what separates expert forecasters from the rest.

Philip Tetlock is an American psychologist and political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania whose decades of research into expert prediction have fundamentally changed how we think about forecasting and judgment under uncertainty. His landmark 2005 study, which tracked the predictions of nearly three hundred experts over twenty years, found that most performed no better than chance — and that pundits were often worse than dart-throwing chimps when predicting political and economic outcomes.

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction, co-authored with journalist Dan Gardner in 2015, translates the findings of Tetlock’s Good Judgment Project into an accessible and practical guide. The project revealed that a small subset of forecasters dramatically outperforms experts, and identified the cognitive habits that distinguish them: intellectual humility, probabilistic thinking, willingness to update beliefs, and the ability to synthesize information from multiple perspectives. The book challenges the celebrity pundit model of expertise and argues that prediction is a skill that can be systematically cultivated.

Tetlock’s research has influenced intelligence agencies, policy institutions, and businesses seeking to make better decisions under uncertainty. His work bridges academic psychology, political science, and practical decision-making in ways that are both rigorous and genuinely useful. For anyone interested in improving their own reasoning or understanding why smart people get predictions so wrong, Superforecasting is essential reading.