For Those Condemned to Study the Past: Reflections on Historical Judgment

When anticipating the future and making decisions in the present, we are all prisoners of the past. Our personal or collective past tell us what factors are important to understand, how good our understanding is, and how many surprises to expect when making our plans. This dependence on the past is in large part justified where else could one turn for wisdom and accumulated experience In trying to learn these lessons, our main, often only, tool is our own intellect. There has, however, been surprisingly little systematic study of the cognitive or thought processes involved in historical judgment, nor how people might be instructed to approach the past more efficaciously. The present report provides a framework for studying historical judgment and describes the conclusions that may be drawn from psychological research and the historiographic literature, the musings of historians about their own craft. The cumulative picture suggests that the past does not yield its secrets readily. Some identifiable and perhaps correctable problems are overinterpreting available evidence, unfairly second quessing historical actors, and exaggerating the predictability of future events for which analogs can be identified in the past. These judgmental biases can be found in lay as wel as professional students of the past. Author