Senior intelligence analysts working in the Privy Council Office have a tendency to lack confidence in their forecasts, a new study shows. The authors analyzed more than 1,500 strategic intelligence forecasts made by analysts advising senior policy makers in the Government of Canada, encompassing 6 years worth of reports.
The usual finding in the forecasting community is a tendency to overconfidence, but the PCO analysts showed the opposite tendency, even though their forecasting skills were shown to be good. The authors showed that steps could be taken to compensate for that underconfidence without trying to “change the analyst.”
Original research paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (U.S.A.) on July 14, 2014.
Names and affiliations of selected authors
