For this edition of BRITE Ideas, we want to highlight a
write-up
of a recent workshop that was held at University of California, Berkeley. The workshop was on the future of forecasting and it highlighted exciting work on forecasting the results of social science research.
The key theme was that there is increasing interest in embedding tasks that get experts (and sometimes professionals or lay audiences) to predict the outcome of research projects before they are known. As the article highlights, this can be useful for a few reasons: It can help the research community overcome hindsight bias because it clarifies what was really known and expected prior to an experimental finding; It also may help researchers decide which treatments to explore when you have a number of possibilities but limited funding.
I think this is an interesting idea and I'd encourage everyone to take a look at this write-up. It has some
useful links
to slides and a number of very interesting studies by highly influential scholars in behavioral/experimental economics and psychology.
