Psychohistory: From Science Fiction to Reality

What Is This Blog About?

In short, this blog is about psychohistory—a fictional science first introduced in Isaac Asimov’s novel Foundation. It aims to describe human society using mathematical methods and even predict its future. Today, thanks to researchers from diverse fields—history, sociology, anthropology, econometrics, and population biology—psychohistory is gradually becoming a reality. Our blog explores the latest research in this field and offers our own reflections on the subject.

For a more detailed discussion, we can break this topic into several parts: what is wrong with traditional history, what psychohistory might look like, and why research in this direction is necessary.

Herodotus' History

Since the time of Herodotus, history has primarily focused on describing past events. Over the centuries, historians have improved the reliability of sources with the help of linguists, archaeologists, geneticists, and even climatologists. However, the core methodology of history remains largely unchanged: collecting and describing facts with only tentative attempts to establish causal relationships between them. To illustrate this, consider that historians debate at least 200 different causes for the fall of the Roman Empire—one of the most significant events in world history [1].

The constant refinement of historical details merely creates an enormous database from which no concrete conclusions can be drawn, making it impossible to develop reliable predictions. In this sense, the classic saying that "history teaches us nothing" is misleading—not because people fail to learn, but because history, in its current form, is incapable of teaching. A vast, unsystematic collection of dates, facts, and events, at best loosely connected by speculative cause-and-effect relationships, cannot serve as a reliable model for understanding contemporary events.

Modern history resembles medieval alchemy: it has accumulated empirical data but failed to synthesize it into a functional science. Examples of knowledge systems that successfully underwent such a transformation in the modern era include physics, astronomy, and chemistry, with biology and economics following later. Over the past 400 years, these disciplines have driven the Industrial Revolution, urbanization, and demographic transitions, ultimately improving the quality of life for billions of people.

A New Approach to History

What sets the methodology of natural sciences apart from other knowledge systems? Primarily, the combined use of experiments (observations, simulations) and theory, rather than treating them separately. Additionally, the scientific method imposes further requirements on both:

• Experiments must be reproducible, yielding similar results under similar conditions.
• Theories must be mathematically formulated and describe phenomena both qualitatively and quantitatively.

A key consequence of these requirements is the predictive power of natural sciences, which explains their success and profound impact on human society.

Clearly, modern history, sociology, and futurism do not meet these criteria. Hegel’s famous aphorism—"History teaches man that man learns nothing from history"—does not reflect human folly but rather the inadequacy of "Herodotean" history for analyzing the present or predicting the future.

One of the main arguments against transforming history into a rigorous science is the supposed impossibility of conducting controlled experiments. However, this objection can be refuted in two ways. First, passively rejecting the modernization of history is counterproductive and does not contribute to our understanding. The refusal to search for patterns in the surrounding world contradicts human nature, and the presence of unexplained phenomena is psychologically unsettling. Second, there already exists a well-developed natural science that faces a similar challenge yet achieves practical results—cosmology. In its case, the solution has been extensive observational studies combined with theoretical modeling and virtual experiments.

Psychohistory

The idea of fundamentally reforming historical science is not new and has long intrigued science fiction writers. The most famous and well-described example is psychohistory from Asimov’s Foundation:

Psychohistory… is that branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli...
...from all these premises, it follows that, using precise mathematical data, one can influence human societies in a predictable manner.
The foundation of psychohistory lies in the development of Seldon functions, which express relationships and determine dependencies between individuals and socio-economic forces...

The novel was written over 70 years ago, but the core idea predates it. As Arthur Conan Doyle wrote in The Sign of Four:

While the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to.

Today, psychohistory is still in its infancy, but it is finally entering real life. We are attempting to construct a coherent framework for psychohistory from many existing fragments, much like assembling a mosaic—except we do not yet know what the final image should look like. Various research groups approach it from different directions, and it is known by many names: Big History, Metahistory, and, most notably, Cliodynamics—the most advanced iteration so far [2].

The Future of Science

This new science must replace traditional history just as Newtonian physics supplanted Aristotelian physics, chemistry replaced alchemy, and evidence-based medicine displaced traditional healing practices. We can already observe what happens when outdated knowledge systems give way to real science—just look at the impact of modern biology, especially genetics and neuroscience.

We have every reason to expect that even the foundational development of psychohistory will have similarly revolutionary consequences. A genuine, rather than superficial, understanding of historical processes and societal development will transform political life. Instead of trial-and-error approaches to societal improvement, we will move toward conscious and systematic future planning.

Even if psychohistory’s predictive capabilities turn out to be limited, we can still anticipate several important side benefits.

One reason history is subject to constant political manipulation is that a mere factual narrative can never be truly objective—it can always be tailored to serve the interests of those funding historical research. By comparison, attempts to politically manipulate physics—such as Nazi Germany’s efforts to create "Aryan science"—failed to produce practical results. Of course, modern natural sciences are not entirely immune to political influence, but their practical value remains undeniable.

Historian Yuval Noah Harari, in Lex Fridman Podcast #390, argues that conspiracy theories thrive because people fear losing control over their lives—an understandable reaction to an increasingly complex world. Addressing this issue is one of psychohistory’s secondary objectives.

There is also an argument for artificial development. Just as natural selection cannot break the sound barrier due to escalating energy costs, but artificial means can achieve it easily, the same principle applies to optimization algorithms in science.

Conclusion

We live in a turbulent era, filled with internal and external conflicts, wars, instability, and crises. Psychohistory may not give us a precise prediction of the future, but even a partial understanding of history’s laws could help us avoid repeating past mistakes. After all, if humanity learns to truly understand itself, this could be the most important scientific revolution of all time.

References:

1. Demandt, A. Der Fall Roms: die Auflösung des Römischen Reiches im Urteil der Nachwelt (Beck, Munich, 1984).
2. Turchin, Peter. “Arise ‘Cliodynamics.’” Nature 454, no. 7200 (July 2008): 34–35. https://doi.org/10.1038/454034a.