Psychohistory (fictional) - Beyond Fiction

Beyond Fiction

Polymath Adolphe Quetelet developed in the 19th century what he called "social physics". Quetelet studied the statistical laws underlying the behaviour of what he called "average man".

Some individuals and groups, inspired by Asimov's psychohistory, seriously explore the possibility of a working psychohistory not unlike the one imagined by Asimov — a statistical study of history that could help in the formulation of some "theory of history" and perhaps become a tool of historical prediction.

Complexity theory, an offshoot of chaos mathematics theory, explored by Stuart Kauffman in his books "At Home in the Universe" and "Redefining the Sacred" cover the concept of statistical modeling of sociological evolutions. The concept was also explored in "Order Out of Chaos" by Ilya Prigogine.

Another theory that has similarities to Psychohistory is "Generational Dynamics" proposed by John J. Xenakis, where he proposes, "Generational Dynamics is a historical methodology that analyzes historical events through the flow of generations, and uses the analysis to forecast future events by comparing today's generational attitudes to those of the past". Essentially, generations immediately after a major crisis event (stock market crash, civil war, world war) will be unwilling to live through such events again and will be risk-averse. Generations after them may well be aware of previous crisis events, but will be more risk-tolerant, as they have not been exposed to the crisis themselves. Xenakis states that this allows one to predict future crisis events by analyzing the current generation's outlooks.

For similar ideas see Peter Turchin's WAR AND PEACE AND WAR: The Life Cycles of Imperial Nations - his science is called cliodynamics.

Nathan Eagle and Alex Pentland (among others) have developed useful techniques for predicting human behavior through statistical analysis of smartphone data.

At the 67th science-fiction world convention in Montreal, Paul Krugman, the Nobel laureate in Economics, mentioned Hari Seldon, a central character in Foundation who was a psychohistorian, as his inspiration to study Economics since it's the closest thing to Psychohistory, according to P. Krugman.