14 DAY TRIAL // We all make predictions every day. They cover a variety of topics, from the weather to the stock market, and they usually have variable chances of coming to pass. A new study indicates that relying on your intuition can make for more accurate predictions, although the reason this happens is unclear.
Writing in the latest issue of the Journal of Consumer Reports, scientists say that test subjects who had confidence in their knowledge fared a lot better when it came to predicting the outcomes of future events.
Those who exhibited less self-confidence proved less likely to make the correct prediction. This phenomenon is known among experts as the “emotional oracle effect,” PsychCentral reports.
“A comparison between predicted and actual weather conditions revealed that 54 percent of the participants with a high trust in feelings made the correct prediction, more than twice the proportion of participants with a low trust in feelings who predicted correctly (21 percent),” the research team writes.