Gill, D. J., Trachtenberg, M., Gill, M. J., Tetlock, P. E., Robb, T. K., Varnum, M. E., ... & Trodd, Z. (2025). Predicting the Past: Testing Expert Historical Judgement. The American Historical Review, 130(4), 1615-1630.

Absences pervade the historical record. The loss or destruction of material, redaction of documents, silence of participants, data embargoes, and poor record keeping present inherent difficulties to any understanding of the past. Gaps in the historical record pose significant challenges but they can also provide valuable opportunities. Instead of avoiding all gaps, historians can test the accuracy of some inferences about the past by carefully outlining their assumptions and explicitly predicting what they believe to have occurred in the absence of evidence. Subsequent discoveries or declassifications can then be used to assess the accuracy of these hypothesized explanations and, in turn, help us to evaluate the quality of historians’ thinking about the unknown past. Given enough examples, we can begin to learn more about how to make better predictions about the past or what we term “retrodictions.”

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