Peter Pre­vos, 25 June 2010.

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Har­vard Style Cita­tion
Peter Pre­vos 2010, ‘Pre­dict­ing beha­viour’, hypotheticorp.org, web­log post, accessed 5 Feb­ru­ary 2012, <http://hypotheticorp.org/wp/management/prediction/>.

APA Style Cita­tion
Peter Pre­vos, (2010, June 25). Pre­dict­ing beha­viour [blog post]. Retrieved from http://hypotheticorp.org/wp/management/prediction/

MLA Style Cita­tion
Peter Pre­vos. “Pre­dict­ing beha­viour” hypotheticorp.org n.p., 25 Jun. 2010. Web. 5 Feb. 2012

When recruit­ing new staff an often used golden rule often is that past beha­viour is an indic­a­tion of future beha­viour. Busi­nesses rely on ref­er­ence checks or even Google searches to find out as much as they can about their poten­tial new staff. But, is past beha­viour really a good proxy for pre­dict­ing future behaviour?

Know­ledge of the past is the found­a­tion of all sci­ence and human know­ledge. We try to pre­dict the future by draw­ing from our exper­i­ence of the past. Philosophers call this pro­cess induct­ive reas­on­ing — draw­ing a gen­eral con­clu­sion from a range of obser­va­tions. But when you think deeply about this, we can actu­ally never know for cer­tain that our past obser­va­tions can be used to pre­dict the future. Scot­tish philo­sopher David Hume did pre­cisely this more then 200 years ago when he found that it is actu­ally not logical to think that past beha­viour is an indic­a­tion of future behaviour.

it is not logical to think that past beha­viour is an indic­a­tion of future behaviour

For mil­len­nia people in Europe thought that all swans are white. This little ker­nel of abso­lute know­ledge was rudely des­troyed when in 1697 Dutch explorer Willem de Vlam­ingh was the first European to see a black swan in what is now West­ern Australia. The silent part of the Amer­ican magician’s duo Penn & Teller broke his usual silence and vow of secrecy when he explained a clas­sical magic trick to a gath­er­ing of con­scious­ness schol­ars. Teller showed that magi­cians can use the propensity of the human mind to seek pat­terns by skil­fully chan­ging the method dur­ing the routine. Teller beau­ti­fully illus­trates what Hume philo­soph­ic­ally argued: in human beha­viour, the past is in no way a reli­able approach to pre­dict­ing the future.

We have to be care­ful when judging a per­son through second hand inform­a­tion gained from ref­er­ees, Face­book searches and other forms of overt espi­on­age. People are not bil­liard balls that oper­ate in accord­ance with laws of phys­ics. People have free will and can change their beha­viour depend­ing on the cir­cum­stances they find them­selves in. Most import­antly, we can learn from our mis­takes and grow as people by learn­ing from them. Not hir­ing some­body who has made a mis­take in the past could mean that you miss out on hir­ing a per­son with a high level of matur­ity and an abil­ity to adapt. Therefore, when judging a per­son, keep in mind the words of Roman poet Hor­ace: Non sum quals eram — I am not who I once was

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