Psychic survey

Our recent Skepticon saw Richard Saunders, from the Australian Skeptics, present the results of The Great Australian Psychic Prediction Project.

Over the past 12 years, the Australian Skeptics recorded and documented psychic predictions covering the 21 year period of 2000 - 2020. They then analysed the predictions of accuracy. This was an impressive effort. It meant recording predictions made by psychics in a variety of media - such as magazines, TV, newspapers, websites and YouTube.

The methodology needed to be carefully devised as it's difficult to describe exactly what constitutes a successful prediction. I can predict, with 100% accuracy, that the sun will rise tomorrow but that doesn't make me psychic!

There was a ton of work in doing this. The size of the database was impressive, with around 3,800 predictions collected over the 21 year period. Each prediction was then analysed to determine what the result was.

“This was done with each prediction being discussed and online searches used to discover the result. At times this was a quick task with the answer found easily as either a predicted event happened, or it did not. At other times it took great effort and much searching to discover the answer. Stock market charts, interest rates over the years, housing markets, exchange rates and so on all took a great deal of time to research. Even the plight of any particular sporting team took time and effort to research. If the conclusion was debated, the author made the final call. Many of these uncertain predictions ended up being catalogued as “Too Vague”.”

Summarising their findings:

• Only 11% of predictions are “correct”.
• The profession's journal, the International Psychics Directory, has only 8.5% correct.
• Most predictions were too vague, expected, or simply wrong.
• Most of what happens is not predicted, and most of what is predicted does not happen.

While it may sound impressive that psychics actually got some claims right, it generally comes down to chance. For example, a psychic may predict that a particular political party would win an election. That they were correct in their prediction doesn't mean they were able to see the event in advance - just that they guessed an outcome and wrote it down.

Many psychics are prolific. If you make a lot of predictions, and they're vague enough, by chance some of them are going to turn out to be correct.

Then there are those predictions that are expected, such as the deaths of elderly prominent people, such as celebrities, politicians or royals.

Finally, it's fairly obvious that psychics can't really predict the future as none of them have predicted major recent events such as the advent of COVID-19 (despite claims that Sylvia Browne did so in a book written just after the SARS outbreak - checked by Snopes).

You can read the article describing the project in detail in the Australian Skeptics magazine.