At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychological scientists frequently made on-the-record predictions in public media about how individuals and society would change. Such predictions were often made outside these scientists' areas of expertise, with justifications based on intuition, heuristics, and analogical reasoning (Study 1; N = 719 statements). How accurate are these kinds of judgments regarding societal change? In Study 2, we obtained predictions from scientists (N = 717) and lay Americans (N = 394) in Spring 2020 regarding the direction of change for a range of social and psychological phenomena. We compared them to objective data obtained at 6 months and 1 year. To further probe how experience impacts such judgments, 6 months later (Study 3), we obtained retrospective judgments of societal change for the same domains (Nscientists = 270; Nlaypeople = 411). Bayesian analysis suggested greater credibility of the null hypothesis that scientists' judgments were at chance on average for both prospective and retrospective judgments. Moreover, neither domain-general expertise (i.e., judgmental accuracy of scientists compared to laypeople) nor self-identified domain-specific expertise improved accuracy. In a follow-up study on meta-accuracy (Study 4), we show that the public nevertheless expects psychological scientists to make more accurate predictions about individual and societal change compared to most other scientific disciplines, politicians, and nonscientists, and they prefer to follow their recommendations. These findings raise questions about the role psychological scientists could and should play in helping the public and policymakers plan for future events. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

中文翻译：

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关于心理科学家对社会变革判断的准确性、媒体表述和公众认知。

在 COVID-19 大流行开始时，心理科学家经常在公共媒体上公开预测个人和社会将如何变化。此类预测通常是在这些科学家的专业领域之外做出的，其理由基于直觉、启发式和类比推理（研究 1；N = 719 个陈述）。这些关于社会变革的判断有多准确？在研究 2 中，我们获得了科学家（N = 717）和普通美国人（N = 394）在 2020 年春季关于一系列社会和心理现象变化方向的预测。我们将它们与 6 个月和 1 年时获得的客观数据进行了比较。为了进一步探讨经验如何影响此类判断，6 个月后（研究 3），我们获得了对同一领域的社会变革的回顾性判断（Nscientists = 270；Nlaypeople = 411）。贝叶斯分析表明，零假设的可信度更高，即科学家的判断对于前瞻性判断和回顾性判断来说平均都是偶然的。此外，一般领域的专业知识（即科学家与外行相比的判断准确性）和自我识别的特定领域专业知识都没有提高准确性。在一项关于元准确性的后续研究（研究 4）中，我们表明，与大多数其他科学学科、政治家和非科学家相比，公众仍然期望心理科学家对个人和社会变化做出更准确的预测，并且他们更愿意遵循他们的建议。这些发现提出了关于心理科学家在帮助公众和政策制定者规划未来事件方面可以和应该发挥的作用的问题。（PsycInfo 数据库记录 (c) 2023 APA，保留所有权利）。