9 out of 10 monkeys believe they are not behind glass

There are two things that could be defined as Psychohistory.

1. The real study of the psychological aspects of historical events.
2. The fictional study of mass human behavior to statistically predict future events.

I am making my way through the Foundation series by Asimov, and I am sure that I am not the first nor the last to think that the basis and potential for the latter could be quite real. But then again, Asimov’s axioms for the fictional psychohistory are way beyond the scope and nature of our current state as human beings. We are far too constrained.

But are we?

What we call government and economy are nothing but human systems. Systems that are made up of irrational human actions that lead to the inevitable logical results. In hindsight, it is immaculately clear, isn’t it? That is really the holy grail of sociology and economics… understanding human behavior to the point that you can accurately forecast the future developments of groups of individuals. Thousands of ideas circulate around this idea of observation and prediction. Media pundits and personalities are always pointing out the obvious and then postulating as to the why. My guess is they are erring on the side of caution and sticking with what everyone knows is true.

Because if someone were to figure it out. If someone were to be able to predict the forces of mass human behavior and the outcomes that would result, we all know we would ignore them. They would be labeled as nutcases, and shuffled off to some dark corner to warn and be duly ignored.

Psychohistory may be possible in the fictional sense, but if it were to approach any sort of scientific level in our real world, it would be ignored. Psychohistory scientists would be pushed into the realm of whackos and psuedoscience, along with the cryptozoologists and alien abductees. Because who would believe that an equation could account for mass human behavior?

It makes you wonder just how possible it could actually be. Of course we may never know. Because another of Asimov’s axioms is that the mass of individuals could not know of the study of psychohistory, because that would change the outcome. Observation changes the results (ie the observer effect).