This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta.

We're surrounded by people who tell us they know what's going to happen in the future.

A lot of people have no idea that Trump is headed for a historic defeat.

Bear Sturge is fine. Don't move your money from there. That's just being silly.

These predictions have a few things in common.

The commentators have complete confidence in themselves.

We as the audience love to hear them make a complicated world seem simple.

And finally, no one ever pays a serious price for being wrong.

Donald Trump wins the presidency.

The country is winning the Super Bowl!

Brady has his ship!

Bear Sturge in the bargain bin sold to rival JP Morgan Chase for just $2 a share.

On today's show, our fascination with making predictions and why we may need a revolution in the way we make them.

If you play the game the way it really should be played, the forecasting game, you're much more subject to embarrassment.

We look at how some people actually are better than others at predicting what's going to happen in the future.

Ironically, these aren't the people you usually find on television,

bloating about what's going to happen next week.

They're ordinary people who happen to know a very important secret.

Predicting the future isn't about being unusually smart or especially knowledgeable.

It's about understanding the pitfalls in the way we think and practicing better habits of mind.

Phil Tetlock is a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania.

Over several decades, he's shown that the predictions of so-called experts are often no better than what he calls

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