Large Study Finds Majority Of Australian Psychics Are Wrong
After looking at more than 3,800 predictions made over 20 years, it's clear they are worse than random guesses.
A huge study has discovered a large majority of predictions made by Australian psychics were wrong.
Who could have predicted that...?
The group Australian Skeptics Inc. has been looking at the forecasts made on TV shows, radio segments, newspapers, and glossy magazines like New Idea and Woman's Day.
Some of the prophecies ranged from the mild to wild.
There were multiple predictions that Queen Elizabeth II was going to abdicate, Barack Obama was apparently going to be assassinated and we were supposed to have amazing technology like anti-gravity by now.
Psychics also thought Nicole Kidman was going to marry a billionaire and Donald Trump was going to be a good president and his cabinet would be the best the US has seen for years.
Australian Skeptics Inc. noted there were more than 3,800 predictions made by 207 Australian psychics between 2000 and 2020.
Incredibly, only 11 per cent of these forecasts ended up being correct. That poor performance was actually worse than a control group of non-psychics who just made random guesses.
Skeptics Inc.'s chief investigator Richard Saunders said: "TV shows want to fill five minutes. They simply couldn't care less about accuracy, as long as the psychic is entertaining, people won't remember the segment or predictions anyway."
He added: "If your car mechanic was wrong 89% of the time, you'd get a different mechanic.
"But if all mechanics were wrong 89% of the time, you'd wonder about the industry as a whole. That what it seems to be with psychics in Australia."
Saunders says their investigation was 'probably the largest such project ever undertaken anywhere in the world'.
He was shocked to see just how out of touch these psychics have been in the past.
"We could not have predicted just how mediocre Australia's best psychics are at seeing the future," the chief investigator said. "Most of what happens is not predicted and most of what is predicted does not happen.
"After 12 years of investigation and analysis, we have no reason to think there are people who really can predict the future better than guessing alone."
Australian Skeptics Inc. says they conducted their own set of predictions for one year to see if they could do any better than the people who call themselves psychic.
Their forecasts ended up having 'a success rate 250 per cent better than the professionals'.
Featured Image Credit: AlamyTopics: Australia
Stewart Perrie