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Glite Dictionary
🧠 Psychological history study 🔮 Science fiction forecasting
psychohistory

psychohistory

1 9.9
A science that uses math and psychology to predict how large groups act in the future
  • noun
  • /ˌsaɪkoʊˈhɪstəri/
  • Specialized
: psico-historia
  • Yeah, SF is chock-full of essential information about faster-than-light travel, telepathy, and psychohistory.

Examples

  • Through psychohistory, sociologists hope to better understand collective movements and trends in society.

  • "Members of the Foundation, psychohistory faces its greatest challenge with the appearance of - "

    Fiction book (2001)

  • Today, only a small, beleaguered rear guard of the faithful still believes that "psychohistory" can save the discipline from the isolation that bureaucratization has imposed on it.

    Academic text (1991)

  • The way you "mathematize" the social sciences is not via some form of psychohistory, but the way the US military/DARPA is doing it: by modeling the real world down to citizen level in a gigantic simulation.

    Blog text (16)

  • Psychohistory combines mathematics and psychology to forecast the behavior of large populations.

  • The concept of psychohistory suggests that human behavior can be predicted if analyzed on a large scale.

Surface Forms

psychohistory singular
psychohistories plural

Morphology

psychohistory = history (opaque) = psycho + history

Although the word is built from the recognizable elements 'psycho-' and 'history', the specialized Asimov sense is a coined technical term whose meaning is not directly recoverable from the parts.

Etymology

Psychohistory is formed from psycho- (from Greek psyche, 'mind') and history ('the past'). In science fiction it is imagined as a way to use ideas about the mind and math to predict how large groups will behave, so the name shows it is about the 'mind' behind history and forecasting the future.