Psychologists found that only one percent of people would like to know their future, regardless of the circumstances, and only ten percent would like to have the gift of predicting negative events. As Gerd Gigerenzer of the Berlin Institute for Human Development notes, Priam's daughter Kassandra had the gift of foresight, but she was cursed and no one wanted to believe her prophecies. Scientists have found that most people are more likely to refuse the gifts of Apollo, which made Cassandra famous, than to accept them. People want to avoid the regret and suffering that knowledge of future events can bring, and to feel the pleasure of waiting for pleasant events.
People have always been interested in how life could change if they received the ability to predict future events, facilitate their occurrence or prevent unwanted ones. This topic is considered both negatively and positively in many religious texts and fiction.
The famous German psychologist Gigernzer, together with his colleague Maria Garcia-Retamero from the Spanish University of Grenada, decided to determine how ordinary people in Spain and Germany feel about the possibility of possessing such a superpower.
During the research, about two thousand people were interviewed in these two countries. As a result, unexpected conclusions were obtained - of all the respondents, only one percent of people would like to have the absolute ability to predict the future, regardless of whether it is positive or negative. About 10 percent of the respondents would like to have the ability to predict negative events, and 30 percent would like to have the ability to predict favorable events.
The only exception was the birth of a child - almost 62 percent of the respondents would like to know the time of birth and the gender of their first child.
Thus, based on the results obtained, we can say that most people do not want to know their future and only a small part of them would like to have the ability to predict future events. It is noteworthy that there was a wide variation in responses among both Germans and Spaniards, despite the religious, cultural and economic differences between the two peoples.
According to scientists, the reluctance of people to know their future may explain the fear of many to do tests for HIV, cancer and many other diseases, as well as distrust of devices that monitor their position on the map and their health. Thus, Gigerenzer concluded, a deliberate unwillingness to know the future, ignorance does not just exist, it is a universal factor.