More exact predictions on a variety of future events can result from a stronger trust in feelings, state researchers. They say individuals who trust their feelings are consistently able to predict future events more accurately than people who do not trust their feelings-a finding called the emotional oracle effect.
The finding is based on a series of eight studies in which participants were asked to predict various future outcomes, including the 2008 U.S. Democratic presidential nominee, the box-office success of different movies, the winner of American Idol, movements of the Dow Jones Index, the winner of a college football championship game, and even the weather.
Despite the range of events and prediction horizons (in terms of when the future outcome would be determined), the results across all studies consistently revealed that people with higher trust in their feelings were more likely to correctly predict the final outcome than those with lower trust in their feelings. The researchers call this phenomenon the emotional oracle effect.
The researchers behind the studies include Professor Michel Tuan Pham, Kravis Professor of Business, Marketing, Columbia Business School; Leonard Lee, Associate Professor, Marketing, Columbia Business School; and Andrew Stephen, PhD '09, currently Assistant Professor of Business Administration, Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business, University of Pittsburgh,
Regardless of the method used, the researchers found that participants who trusted their feelings in general or were induced to trust their feelings experimentally were more accurate in their predictions compared to participants with lower trust in their in their feelings and participants in a control group.
In one study involving the Clinton-Obama contest in 2008, high-trust-in-feelings respondents predicted correctly for Obama about 72 percent of the time compared with low-trust respondents, who predicted for Obama about 64 percent of the time - a striking result given that major polls reflected a very tight race between Clinton and Obama at that time.
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The researchers explain their findings through a "privileged window" hypothesis.
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In accordance with the privileged window hypothesis, the researchers caution that some amount of relevant knowledge appears to be required to more accurately forecast the future.
For example, in one study participants were asked to predict the weather. While participants who trusted their feelings were again better able to predict the weather, they were only able to do so for the weather in their own zip codes, not for the weather in Beijing or Melbourne.
Professor Leonard Lee explained this is because "...they don't possess a knowledge base that would help them to make those predictions."
As another example, only participants who had some background knowledge about the current football season benefited from trust in feelings in predicting the winner of the national college football BCS game.
Thus, if we have a proper knowledge base, the future need not be totally indecipherable if we simply learn to trust our feelings.
The finding will be published in the Journal of Consumer Research.
Source-ANI