Christopher Dictus: Crowdsourced Forecasting in Support of Government Foresight

Policymakers, analysts, and the intelligence community frequently confront complex, emerging challenges that test their best analytical techniques. However, individual experts often struggle when it comes to predicting future events - one political psychologist has suggested that, on average, their accuracy is comparable to chance. Crowdsourced forecasting offers an innovative approach to government foresight. Crowdsourced forecasting is the practice of aggregating quantitative predictions about future events or trends from large groups of people. It represents a substantive improvement in predictive work because multiple perspectives help mitigate the impact of cognitive biases and individuals can be trained to produce better forecasts. In this masterclass, Dr. Christopher Dictus from the RAND Forecasting Initiative provided an introduction to crowdsourced forecasting: demonstrating how the process works and how it can be integrated with other foresight methods.