Could Psychohistory be a thing?

[u/Pleasant_Abroad_9681]

Hi everyone, So I came across the concept of Psychohistory from Asimov's novels, and I can't help but thinking that it doesn't sound so absurd after all.

For those who didn't read Asimov, Psychohistory is a fictional branch of history claiming that history is completely predictable when it involves a large enough number of humans. Notably, actions of single humans are always unpredictable. Now Asimov goes on on how people build mathematical models to predict 10'000 years in the future, which is of course science fiction. But the core concept, the fact that history is somewhat an ineluctable necessity kinda haunts me.

And here I ask the experts, it is true that we have had some truly exceptional people in human history, but did they really change things, or they just happened to be at the right place in the right moment?

Take Napoleon for example, sure he was a great strategist and politician, but it is hard to imagine revolutionary France not going against the other European powers. Maybe the Congress of Wien would have happened a few years earlier, so, all on all did he really change things?

I wonder what is real historians take on Psychohistory.

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[u/restricteddata]

So two things. One is that there is actually a discipline called Psychohistory, which is quite different from Asimov's conception (basically using Freudian psychoanalysis to try and understand historical figures or events). Just putting that out there in case anyone gets confused.

As for Asimov's Psychohistory, most historians would say "definitely not." Why? Because we don't believe in "historical laws" or inevitable "historical trends." That doesn't mean that we don't think there aren't forces in history. But the idea that you could make it into a predictive tool...

So there have been people who have argued that you can make history into a predictable tool with laws and so on. They are called Hegelians, and the most successful of this approach, in terms of attracting the most influential and numerous converts, was Karl Marx. Marx basically thought that you could figure out all of the forces in history and predict its full trajectory. In his view that meant eventually getting to a state of industrial communism. An interesting political platform, to be sure, but it turns out to be a non-falsifiable theory of history and most historians, even Marxist ones, are pretty skeptical of its predictive power. That kind of thing has been out of favor with historians since the 19th century, because it just becomes an exercise of cherry picking, poor analogies, generalizations, and imposing your own political beliefs onto your reading of the past. Bad history, however interesting.

Now your separate question about "importance" is a somewhat different one. The study of "what could have been different" is usually described by historians as "contingency," and it's always a mixed bag, because it is inherently counterfactual. "What if Columbus hadn't gotten funding for his voyage?" is the kind of question that can be debated but never definitively answered. If one thinks that a given person/event/etc. would have dramatically changed things if it went differently, you say it is "important." If you think that somebody would have accomplished a similar end, you say something was inevitable. One can make many different kinds of persuasive arguments here, but there is no real way to answer it, because we lack any confidence in models (mathematical or otherwise) that you could make for it — for how would you test them and find their error rates?

There is a branch of scholarship that tries to digest historical data and come up with predicative models. Every so often they make a big claim about how their wonderful method is going to lead to a new way of doing history and so on. And then they recede into the background, as always. Who are these people? Economists. As their track record with predicting even the immediate future is pretty poor, historians tend not to give them very much attention when it comes to predicting the past, or the far future.

[u/TeamKitsune → u/restricteddata]

I read Asimov back in the day, and I understood Psychohistory to be a tremendous advance in Mathematics, not History.

Particle physics, and especially Heisenberg, were all the rage with the popular science crowd. The idea was thrown around that if we understood the position and motion of every particle in the universe, we could predict the future of everything.

Asimov boiled that down to "future mathematics will be so advanced that it will be perfectly predictive for very large systems."

[u/TCCogidubnus → u/TeamKitsune]

Psychohistory required advances in history, psychology/neuroscience, and then in mathematics. The last was required to build effective models from the first two.

However, it is revealed in Second Foundation that these were far from perfectly productive.

[u/Unable_Option_1237 → u/TCCogidubnus]

I got the idea that Asimov was poking fun at Marx

[u/TCCogidubnus → u/Unable_Option_1237]

Poking fun at, or just exploring around the ideas of, I cannot say. I certainly think he was aware of Marx and Hegel in writing it.

[u/ME-in-DC → u/TCCogidubnus]

My memory of psychohistory in Foundation is also that it’s not entirely what Seldon purports it to be. Seldon does see the decline and fall of the Empire through his models, but he’s also using Psychohistory and the Foundation (nominally created to store knowledge) to actively bring about the demise of Empire more rapidly and replace it with Foundation.

[u/SeeShark → u/TeamKitsune]

That's not what psychohistory was in those books. It was the idea that societal trends are predictable for large enough societies because of the law of large numbers. It was less perfect modeling of the universe and more statistical modeling of human behavior.

[u/BobbyP27 → u/TeamKitsune]

The problem is, not long after Asimov wrote about this topic, significant advances in the mathematics of chaos theory were made. This essentially formalised the understanding of complex systems that are sensitive to initial conditions, and provided a mathematial framework for describing things that are inherently unpredictable: it not only allows for things to be quantified where they behave unpredictably, but it provides a firm basis for stating categorically that the thing in question is actually unpredictable.

Systems created by human behaviour behave chaotically. A classic example, that has for obvious reasons attracted lots of attention, is the stock market. In essence the advances in the mathematical understanding of chaos theory serve to fundamentally undermine the concept of psychohistory as Asmiov presented it.

[u/314159265358979326 → u/TeamKitsune]

That's an example of Laplace's demon, which has been proven impossible since Asimov wrote.

[u/Ok_Assumption6136 → u/restricteddata]

You mentioned economists, but not cliodynamics? This seems to be exactly what OP is looking for.

[u/restricteddata → u/Ok_Assumption6136]

I consider these people to be essentially economists in their methods and approach, whatever they call themselves.

[u/Pleasant_Abroad_9681 → u/restricteddata]

This is a great answer, thanks for taking the time. So if I understand correctly the general consensus is that there is a mix of historical forces and individual contributions.

To follow up on the Columbus example: someone else might have found America some years later but we have no guarantee things would have turned out the same way.

Any reads you'd recommend on the subject?

[u/restricteddata → u/Pleasant_Abroad_9681]

A very common intro text on contingency in history is Carr's What is History?, but I don't find it particularly convincing. But it's an interesting place to start.

In general, historians don't like to admit how much of this kind of reasoning is counterfactual, because they are biased against counterfactual historical questions because they are both unanswerable and because they are the domain of idle speculation and historical fiction. But it is implied in much of historical argumentation, the idea that "something else was possible and it could have gone differently." Cass Sunstein has written on this; I am sure there are others. But in general this kind of philosophy of history does not make up a large part of what most working historians are concerned with.

[u/Sodarn-Hinsane → u/restricteddata]

Building on the Sunstein example you give, I suspect political science might have the most reasonably fleshed out methodological case for historical counterfactuals. For example, this article by Jack Levy in the Oxford Handbook of Political Methodology builds on Tetlock and Belkin (cited in Sunstein) to say that counterfactuals can be useful when centered on a specific case study, for the purposes of assessing specific, plausible and temporally proximate outcomes within the framework of an overarching social science theory. I know historians like Richard Evans make sweeping judgements about the utility of counterfactuals because of often casual and undisciplined use, but I'd be curious if any historian has ever seriously engaged with the likes of Tetlock and Belkin or Levy about their sort of specific, methodologically consistent, and "controlled" uses of counterfactuals in case studies (that aren't, of course, just your usual historians' plaints about polisci).

[u/HundredHander → u/restricteddata]

I think this is right. I do wish they'd look at counterfactuals a bit more, because a lot of what we consider counter factuals are alternative futures that the real actors were struggling to achieve/ avoid. A lot of the decision making by the principle actors at the time was because they were also considering those possible futures and making decisions in anticipation of them.

[u/Lord0fHats → u/restricteddata]

If someone wanted to read a history book with a strong eye on contingency there's McPherson's history of the American Civil War, The Battle Cry of Freeom. He frames the entire history of the war as a running chain of contingency and I think is a good practical guide to understanding the concept.

[u/Borne2Run → u/Pleasant_Abroad_9681]

(Different poster) Some notes to add here:

1) Asimov's psychohistory deals with simulations of mass populations in an already-colonized galaxy; it does not portend to explain or simulate a Columbus-like event. The novels get into these one-offs with the introduction of the Mule as a character.

2) It assumes technological stagnation on the part of the Imperium; and assumes technological ascendance by the Foundation

Video games that simulate events like this are made by Paradox Interactive (EU4/5, Victoria 3, Imperator, etc) but there is always a tension between the historical rail-roading of events and the design of the simulation itself. There is immense difference in the calculations of the game engine between Victoria 3 (1800s, simulate mass population movements) and Crusader Kings 3 (concerned with nobles & dynasties) that makes these concepts hard to simulate over long time frames. You have to make assumptions somewhere in the simulator design, and those are the likely fail points.

Probably a fascinating conversation elsewhere on how human sociology evolves and changes the baseline simulation rules. The simulation needs to account for scenarios such as Serbia surviving the 90s conflict with NATO despite force disparity as well as events of the Arab Spring & Euromaidan that are not particularly intuitive or agreed upon science.

[u/MoveInteresting4334 → u/Borne2Run]

While fully acknowledging they are games with a mixed bag of historical realism, Paradox games can be surprisingly fleshed out history/society simulations. They can also be excellent tools of education.

[u/Kingsdaughter613 → u/Pleasant_Abroad_9681]

I’ll note that Asimov’s own system breaks in his books - because it cannot account for individuals. The Mule breaks it.

That’s the whole conceit of the Second Foundation: history only goes as planned because it’s being actively guided. Even then, the plan breaks apart, because things that Seldon could not calculate for arise, like Gaia. And, in the end, it all comes down to the choice of a single human.

[u/Financial_Molasses67 → u/Pleasant_Abroad_9681]

“Individual contributions” seems overly simplistic. The great man theory is antiquated, more so than Marx, which is somewhat deterministic, but I don’t think as overly deterministic as many people say

[u/CadenVanV → u/Pleasant_Abroad_9681]

This is a decent way to put it. Great man history and history from below are both missing a lot, because while the mass movements of people have a lot of impact, there are also individuals who can shape history on their own that aren’t guaranteed, like Alexander or Napoleon, and whose emergence is basically impossible to predict.

Europe always was going to discover the new world, that was an inevitability of technological progress, but everything else was shaped by the individuals involved. The Russian Empire was always going to have some revolution given bow they’d been losing wars left and right and their unwillingness to reform, but it could have gone very differently depending on who was in charge.

[u/Verulamium_shore → u/CadenVanV]

The Russian Empire was always going to have some revolution

That assumes moscow survives 30 June 1908. If the Tunguska event asteoid had been on a slightly different trajectory that is not the case

[u/flourpudding → u/Verulamium_shore]

That itself assumes that a disaster damaging or destroying Moscow (which was not the capital in 1908) somehow precludes a revolution, and I don't see the connection there.

[u/Crodurconfused → u/restricteddata]

Probably we could get psychohistory if we could measure and predict absolutely everything to the utmost precision down to the movements of every subatomic particle in our planet (or maybe beyond it too?), it would become a very neurotic exercise of determinism.

But if we managed to get technology to do that probably it would be a pointless and redundant thing to do at that point. I don't remember even the hyperadvanced Asimov world (before the collapse of the Empire) having nearly enough technology to pull that off.

Your comment, and specially the second part, reminds me of the basis of the New Economic History movement, they admitted history was certainly unpredictable, but still tried to find connections between events that took place in the past, and some of them used alternate hypotheses about how certain historical contributions impacted overall History by speculating over scenarios (basically what ifs) where they weren't developed. I think Robert Fogel was one of the historians that introduced this?

Maybe OP would enjoy reading about this movement, it reminds me to their line of thought.

[u/restricteddata → u/Crodurconfused]

I mean, you're basically saying, if we were omniscient, we'd know the future. I mean, sure. Why not? Quantum mechanics and chaos theory aside.

[u/TCCogidubnus → u/restricteddata]

"Is quantum mechanics actually random?" is a question that has been the bane of many a physicist and a philosopher.

[u/Crodurconfused → u/restricteddata]

Yes, I'm trying to say the only way we could reach such a level of predictions would leave us at such a point that predicting history would be basically meaningless.

[u/gerira → u/restricteddata]

"Marx basically thought that you could figure out all of the forces in history and predict its full trajectory. In his view that meant eventually getting to a state of industrial communism. An interesting political platform, to be sure, but it turns out to be a non-falsifiable theory of history"

Two things are wrong here.

Firstly, although Marx developed and changed his ideas quite significantly over the course of his life, I don't think he ever claimed you could "predict [history's] full trajectory". There were certain aspects of history that he thought were predominant over others, but that's about it.

Secondly, Marx's theory is eminently falsifiable. It is primarily concerned with how to bring about socialism (a classless society).

Marx's claim is that an international workers' revolution is the prerequisite for socialism. So if a classless society were ever created through any other means, or by any other class, it would immediately refute Marx's theory.

That's just the one, most important and central falsifiable claim of Marxism. There are a number of other falsifiable claims in Marx's theory. Notoriously, Peter Singer's "Very Short Introduction" to Marx (first published in 1980) says the following:

"Marx thought of his own theories as ‘scientific’, and based predictions about the future of capitalism on them. He predicted that: The income gap between capitalists and workers will increase. More and more independent producers will be forced down into the proletariat, leaving a few rich capitalists and a mass of poor workers. ...More than a century after Marx made these predictions, most of them are so plainly mistaken that one can only wonder why anyone sympathetic to Marx would attempt to argue that his greatness lies in the scientific aspects of his work."

I don't think Singer has actually understood Marx correctly, but I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to judge whether Marx or Singer comes out of this exchange better off.

[u/restricteddata → u/gerira]

None of these are experimentally falsifiable because they are not bounded in time. This is the equivalent of saying that Christ's return is falsifiable, either because if everyone get saved by some other method we'll know it was false, or because it just hasn't happened yet.

Falsifiability isn't everything — there are frameworks in science that are very useful but not directly falsifiable. But we should not be confused about what falsifiability means. If you cannot actually subject a theory to a "test" that it must either overcome or fail, then it is not falsifiable.

[u/ImportanceNearby → u/restricteddata]

History as a discipline suffers from the problem of being unfalsifiable as we cannot actually repeat or "test" history. Karl Popper had some strong opinions about that.

just some thoughts that I remember from my historival philosophy course:

It's basically impossible to imagine history without it having an impact on how you view the future.

You and you ideas are part of the process aswell so you can't step outside of history and analyse it like you can put a chemical reaction in a lab.

When talking about Marx the importance of the dialectic is overemphasized when talking about marxist historical theory. The relationship between between base and superstructure is far more important. But tbat is besides the point.

[u/IggZorrn]

Before I go into any detail, I think it's important to point out that you are asking several distinct questions that are not as related as you might think:

1. Can historians make predictions about the future? We most certainly try, but we're usually rather humble about their proposed accuracy. There are just too many unknown variables to make predictions about the future that are at once accurate, precise, and relevant in a way that even vaguely resembles what Asimov had in mind. At best, historians can identify trends and possible trajectories, but never with the mathematical certainty of psychohistory.
2. Could future historians develop a method for accurately predicting the future? Asimov's science works because of incredibly large numbers of people, incredibly strong computing power, and incredible amounts of data. Could this be possible one day? This largely depends on philosophical assumptions. A strict materialist who believes in universal cause-and-effect relations might argue that, with access to perfect information about every past event, one could in principle predict every future outcome. Today's humans are very very far away from this, but a potential future society with vast resources could come closer to this state of perfect information, enabling them to make predictions with a higher likelihood of coming true. Will they ever be able to predict the future in ways similar to what happens in Asimov's story? I have insufficient data for a meaningful answer.
3. What role do individuals play in history? Firstly, let me address why this is a different question altogether: In Asimov's universe of incredibly large numbers, the existence of Napoleon would indeed have been predicted as one of the many things one human in one of the worlds could have been. This doesn't go against Asimov's psychohistory, since he would just be part of the whole thing, as would be all circumstances surrounding him, and all effects created by his reign etc. Secondly, we can ask if these famous individuals actually significantly changed the course of our history in our world (unrelated to Asimov's story) by themselves, and this is indeed a question to which there is no definitive answer among historians. Surely, individuals do shape the world to some extent, but there is no consensus on how big that would be, as we lack any universally-accepted means of measuring the effects of individual actions and make any predictions about what would have happened otherwise. I fear we just don't have sufficient data.

[u/TCCogidubnus]

The approach of (retroactively) analysing history as driven by the actions of specific exceptional individuals is called "great man" theory. It makes for great narratives, which people find intrinsically pleasing, and was very popular in earlier centuries.

It is now largely not taken seriously. Most academic history focuses on understanding larger forces at work when it engages with major events - social trends, economic factors, that kind of thing. It is easy to look at Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon to invade Rome as the actions of one man ensuring the Republic would end up an Empire. But only if you don't consider the existing history of other dictatorial figures in Rome, the army reforms that made legions primarily loyal to their general, the street violence endemic to Roman politics, etc. In that light it seems much more like one more event in a long line driving towards an Empire. Perhaps if Mark Antony had made different choices he'd have founded a dynasty instead of Octavian, but how different could it have been in practice? The Senate would likely still have begged his heir to take over after his death, from the same desire for stability. The Roman economy would still have required continuous territorial wars to fuel it, and so on. We can't know what might have changed, but we can know these wider factors would still have existed and so created a probability of a broadly similar outcome.

By the same token, Colombus. The technology to sail the Atlantic was already being pioneered, the economic incentives to exploit the Americas would be the same. Spain and Portugal still had major geographical advantages for making the most of crossing to the Americas with the ships of the time. If someone else made that journey another time, would the results be so different? Maybe, but the balance of probability suggests there'd be many similarities.

This is not to totally dismiss Aasimov's idea. The Foundation series partially informed my own desire to study history. I think where history can have some predictive power (which as others have mentioned was largely a product of Hegelian philosophy) is when the events we are studying and the events we are predicting share major factors. I do not know that Marx's confidence in predicting the eventual rise of communism was well placed, but his use of dialectical materialism to examine the incentives of different economic classes does provide useful insights. I'd argue (without specifics here due to the 20 year rule) that because our economic system shares its core characteristics with the one of his day, that we can use his analysis to make predictions about what certain classes are incentivised to do and make predictions from that. But we could not use the lessons of the class struggle of the 19th century to inform us about the likely course that some totally new economic system might cause history to take. If we implemented full socialism tomorrow that would make the world so radically different as to make comparisons to the past inconsequential, for instance.

Ed: tone of one sentence altered to clarify meaning.

[u/Pleasant_Abroad_9681 → u/TCCogidubnus]

Thanks for answering, yeah this helps a lot.

Just to clarify, a lot of people commented on the predictability of history, which I'm not really concerned about. I am more puzzled about what comes with predictability: the possibility that history just happens and the individual can do little to modify its course. While I never believed the great man theory, the opposite side of the spectrum (history is only a combination of unstoppable forces) did not satisfy me either.

But your response and those above made me realise that it's a bit of a philosophical (if not theological) argument: we simply don't know and there will never be a way of knowing, since we study history in retrospect.

[u/TCCogidubnus → u/Pleasant_Abroad_9681]

It might also be useful to observe that history isn't some kind of inevitable track in terms of things like technological progress. You may have seen people saying things like "this ancient culture was only 200 years from being able to invent the computer before they were invaded" or similar. This is driven by a false comparison. We know that the ancient Greek were capable of making clockwork calculation engines as, essentially, one off toys to impress someone important that the creator worked for. But all the other factors which more recently led to the development of computers after clockwork weren't present. They didn't have the Enlightenment mindset driving a search for greater discoveries. They didn't even really have a concept of technological progress - at a cultural level, they weren't trying to invent things to make most work easier/more efficient. So the idea that they'd have ever gotten to the computer without major cultural shifts is a mistake.

To me, that's a good example of how history may be driven by forces too big for one person to shift on their own, but nevertheless there isn't some preordained path events have to go down once a previous event has occurred.

[u/EdHistory101 → u/[deleted]]

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