This is connected a little by some recent research by Phil Tetlock.
Tetlock is now here at the University of Pennsylvania.
This book was written when he was at Berkeley.
And it was a unique study of judgement in the field of psychology.
Usually when judgement study in psychology, especially historically,
is done with experimental research, often using students.
And they're short little stimuli.
Tetlock did something quite unusual.
He decided to study the judgement of real world experts, economists,
political commentators, political scientists, about real world problems.
Things like, what's going to happen in South Africa?
What's going to happen with the dissolution of the Soviet Union?
What's going to happen in future elections?
Where is the economy going?
So, over a ten year period of time,
which at the time was unheard of to study judgement this way,
over a ten year period of time Tetlock captured people's predictions.
And then followed what actually happened in the world to figure out how good they
were at making these predictions.
And what he found was that there is rampant overconfidence.
The overconfidence we observe in the lab, we also observe in the real world.
And importantly,
he was trying to understand what distinguishes those who are overconfident
from those who are well-collaborated, and he couldn't find anything.
Nothing that you might think would predict that, education, political orientation,
gender, these things don't relate to that.
He did find one difference, though, and he called it Cognitive Style.
And he differentiates what he called foxes,
borrowing framework from Irving Berlin, foxes from hedgehogs.
This actually differentiated those who were overconfident from those who were
better calibrated.
What does he mean by it?
Hedgehogs, Tetlock says, are thinkers who know one big thing.
They aggressively extend the explanatory reach of that
one big thing into new domains.
They display bristly impatience with those who don't get it.
And express considerable confidence that they are already pretty proficient
forecasters, at least in the long-term.
Foxes, on the other hand, are, Tetlock says,
thinkers who know many small things, tricks of the trade.
They're skeptical of grand schemes.
They see explanation and prediction not as deductive exercises, but
rather exercises in flexible ad hocery that require stitching together
diverse sources of information.
And these judges are rather diffident about their own forecasting ability.
This is the big distinction, and this is the only distinction he found,
that predicts good judgement in these real world, meaningful situations.
We bring it up now because foxes are exactly the kind of folks that would use
all three levels from Allison's models.
Foxes are those who don't go to the mat believing in model one, or
go to the mat believing in model three.
They just think, well,
I need to look at these situations from multiple perspectives.
I'm going to be a better judge of what happens next if I bring
multiple lenses to the situation.