Immediate and short-term judgemental forecasting: Personologism, situationism or interactionism?

Abstract This study examines the relative influence of the person and the forecasting situation on the quality of judgemental probability forecasting in the immediate- and short-term. College students made forecasts for low- and high-desirable events over forecast periods differing in imminence and time duration. The major finding is one of strong evidence for personologism in forecasting response and performance. Situational effects on forecasting and interactions between the forecasting situation and the forecaster were found to be negligible, at least with the sample of people and situations studied here. It may well be possible to select people with an all-round ability in judgemental forecasting.

[1]  George Wright,et al.  Changes in the realism and distribution of probability assessments as a function of question type , 1982 .

[2]  Donald B. Rubin,et al.  The Dependability of Behavioral Measurements: Theory of Generalizability for Scores and Profiles. , 1974 .

[3]  B. Fischhoff,et al.  Calibration of probabilities: the state of the art to 1980 , 1982 .

[4]  A. Tversky,et al.  The Psychology of Preferences , 1982 .

[5]  N. Weinstein.  Unrealistic optimism about future life events , 1980 .

[6]  Ayleen Wisudha,et al.  Distribution of probability assessments for almanac and future event questions , 1982 .

[7]  S. Lichtenstein,et al.  Do those who know more also know more about how much they know?*1 , 1977 .

[8]  B. Fischhoff,et al.  Training for calibration. , 1980 .

[9]  M. A. Milburn,et al.  Sources of bias in the prediction of future events , 1978 .

[10]  W. C. Howell,et al.  Uncertainty measurement: A cognitive taxonomy , 1978 .

[11]  D. Magnusson,et al.  Toward an interactional psychology of personality. , 1976, Psychological bulletin.

[12]  A. H. Murphy.  A New Vector Partition of the Probability Score , 1973 .

[13]  Cornelius J. Casey.  The Usefulness Of Accounting Ratios For Subjects Predictions Of Corporate Failure - Replication And Extensions , 1980 .

[14]  B. Fischhoff,et al.  Behavioral Decision Theory , 1977 .

[15]  M. A. Borges,et al.  Effects of Gender, Age, Locus of Control, and Self-Esteem on Estimates of College Grades , 1980 .

[16]  N. Endler,et al.  Generalizability of contributions from sources of variance in the S-R inventories of anxiousness. , 1969, Journal of personality.

[17]  Spyros Makridakis,et al.  Forecasting Methods for Management , 1989 .

[18]  Persons, situations, interactions and error: consistency, variability and confusion , 1986 .

[19]  K S Bowers,et al.  Situationism in psychology: an analysis and a critique. , 1973, Psychological review.

[20]  Elizabeth C. Hirschman,et al.  Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases , 1974, Science.

[21]  P. Slovic,et al.  Reversals of preference between bids and choices in gambling decisions. , 1971 .

[22]  Donald L. Davis,et al.  Are some cognitive types better decision makers than others? An empirical investigation , 1982 .

[23]  John W. Payne,et al.  Contingent decision behavior. , 1982 .

[24]  Steven C. Wheelwright,et al.  Forecasting methods and applications. , 1979 .

[25]  N. Endler,et al.  The case for person-situation interactions. , 1975 .

[26]  A. Adinolfi.  Relevance of person perception research to clinical psychology. , 1971 .

[27]  S. Golding.  Flies in the ointment: Methodological problems in the analysis of the percentage of variance due to persons and situations. , 1975 .

[28]  Dan Zakay,et al.  The relationship between the probability assessor and the outcomes of an event as a determiner of subjective probability , 1983 .

[29]  P. Ayton,et al.  The evidence for interactionism in psychology: a reply to Furnham and Jaspars , 1985 .

[30]  G. Brier,et al.  External correspondence: Decompositions of the mean probability score , 1982 .

[31]  N. Endler,et al.  Estimating Variance Components from Mean Squares for Random and Mixed Effects Analysis of Variance Models , 1966 .

[32]  L. Beach,et al.  Subjective probability estimates and confidence ratings , 1969 .

[33]  George Wright,et al.  Investigative Design and Statistics , 1986 .

[34]  N. Endler,et al.  S-R inventories of hostility and comparisons of the proportions of variance from persons, responses, and situations for hostility and anxiousness. , 1968, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[35]  J. Tukey.  One Degree of Freedom for Non-Additivity , 1949 .

[36]  F. O'carroll.  Subjective Probabilities and Short‐Term Economic Forecasts: An Empirical Investigation , 1977 .