If you were given the opportunity to know your entire future, would you want to? Most people answer yes without hesitation when it’s hypothetical. Put a real offer in front of them, and a surprising number suddenly want out.
A new survey from TradeHandle.com found that 39 percent of Americans would turn down the chance to see their own future with complete accuracy, even with zero strings attached. The company surveyed 2,500 people, and the results split into a few distinct camps. Thirty-six percent said they’d want to know everything, good and bad. Nearly a quarter wanted only the good parts, because ignorance is bliss. Just 2 percent wanted exclusively the bad news, a group that presumably enjoys being right more than being happy.
For the 61 percent who were curious, money came first. Eighteen percent said the one thing they’d want guaranteed knowledge of is how rich they’ll eventually become. Whether their family ends up happy ranked second at 17 percent, and how long they’ll live came in third at 16 percent. Knowing who they’ll spend their life with placed lower than all three, which says something about where people’s priorities actually sit once the hypothetical gets specific.
Americans Mainly Just want to know If they’ll have money in the future
To test whether Americans are any good at predicting anything in the first place, TradeHandle also had respondents call a handful of sports outcomes, things like the USMNT’s World Cup opener against Paraguay and the NBA championship. Tennessee came out on top with 55 percent accuracy, beating the national average of 45 percent. North Carolina followed close behind, with Alabama and New York tied for third.
More than a third of people, 37 percent, already believed they were better predictors than the average American before any of this was tested. Some of them were apparently right.
There’s a clear distance between what people say they want from the future and what they actually pick once given one real answer to work with. Money beats love. Logic beats gut, with 57 percent of respondents saying they lean on stats over instinct when making predictions, even about their own lives.
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