What is easier to predict — the events of tomorrow or the distant future? It turns out that we feel more confident when we make forecasts for the long term.
After a series of experiments, this conclusion was reached by Shiri Nussbaum and Nira Liberman, researchers at Tel Aviv University (Israel), and Yaacov Trope from New York University (USA).
The fact is that judgments about the distant future are more connected with the work of abstract thinking. When discussing global prospects, we rely on general patterns formulated on the basis of logic, and therefore we feel confident in our forecasts.
And predicting the near future requires attention to the specific and often ambiguous circumstances of the present, and our confidence in such predictions is generally less.