The future being like the past...

[reissgo]

I doing some research for a book on economics and have come up against a
certain psychological phenomena that I wish to describe - but I don't know the
term for it.

The phenomena is the general tendancy for us to presume that behaviours
will continue regardless of whether we understand them or not. So for example,
when people saw tha sun rise every day, they would naturally assume that it
would go on rising every day and this prediction was being made long before
people knew the mechanics of the solar system. Or if we see a rock apparently
flying in our direction we will jump out of the way based on the assumption
that it will continue in its current trajectory - without knowing anything about
Newton's laws of motion.

In the world of economics, one example is that many people assumed
(say this is 2007) that house prices would go on rising in value purely based
on the fact that they had been rising in price so steadily for so many years.

Is there some commonly accepted label in psychology for this effect?

[gone]

Ancient people didn't expect the sun to rise everday, they knew without it, no life on earth would exist. They gave sacrifices to the sun and created elaborte myths to worship it. The death of the Sun (winter solstice - in roman times was known as 'sol invictus' - the unconqured sun) is Xmas or Christmas time as we now know it and is when the sun reaches its lowest point in the sky, it seems to die, then 3 days later it begins to rise again and get higher in the sky until the summer solstice when from it's height, it begins to get lower and lower seemingly disappearing (dying) until around xmas time again.. (You see the sun in summer is high, the sun in winter is low).. You may be familiar with this story of the sun dying then being resurected in the personification of Jesus, (the sun/son) who died and then rose again and was the saviour (this same personification in repeat throught history but most famously Horus the Sun God in ancient Egypt. See here.


In the past we gave sacrifices to please gods (we created) to ensure crops would grow, the enemy would be defeated etc.. it was SUPERSTICIAN based upon experience.. see Skinner for more info on behaviours and supersticians (the pigeon experiment).

We become more knowledgeable with experience. As a baby in a pram we may see a rock coming towards us and do  nothing, that rock hits us so hard it hurts and we don't forget it, to protect us from the same horrible experience in the future, next time we know to duck or we'll get hurt from the flying rock..

Supersticians are based upon a simial theory, if crops gave a good yeild one year in ancient times after sacrificing many people. They would associate sacrificing many peoples with a fruitful harvest. If the crops did't grow, they would think they did not please the gods, and find reason in that, perhaps they didn't sacrifice enough people, so they'll sacrifice more.. and if that doesn't work they'll create then blame and burn the witches (or something like that).. Before knowledge supersticians inhibited behavouirs.

Not all people follow trends though. When house prices were going up I couldn't believe how people would talk "I've remorgaged my house because it's worth twice at much now so I'm using the difference to buy this and that".. That actually defied logic to me and I couldn't believe people were so stupid. I also couldn't believe that people were so stupid to buy at the height of house prices, as that too defied logic. The land and raw materials were NEVER worth as much as the people were paying or believing their property was worth. It was senseless to believe in such nonsence and even more ludicrous to invest financially into such idiocy. I am no financial expert but I have common sense and that defied common sense, giving people massive mortgages they clearly couldn't afford for massive inflated house prices. The motivation was staff were on commission of selling mortgage products to fund their own overinflated lifestyle because no corporation pays a decent wage.. Get caught up in the rat race of the culture and loose touch with common sense and independent thinking. House prices CAN'T go on rising, anyone with common sense knows the bottom will fall out, but people don't have common sense.

The label you are looking for is perhaps 'common sense'... based upon knowledge, observation, experience, probability, statistics etc... If people don't have 'common sense' they may think in 'supersticious' terms.

[reissgo]

thanks psycho-mother for the long reply - but I think that "common sense" is far too general a term for the phenomena described.

What I am after is in relation to following some sort of trajectory - something making a progression along some kind of scale - perhaps getting hotter and hotter, or faster and faster, or smellier and smellier, or closer and closer or higher and higher... in all of these cases people are prone (though not guaranteed) to predicting that the next step is for that thing to get even more hot/fast/smelly/close/high... I want to give this type of prediction a label. Perhaps something like "trajectory extension" or some such. I can't believe that there is not discussion of this in the psychology literature.

[gone]

For the technical term it's THE LAW OF PROBABILITY http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability

[reissgo]

After some digging around, it seems that there is a word for this phenomena in relation to share dealing - its called "momentum trading" but after having asked a few psychology professors today, the consensus is that there is no generalised term for this in psychology... which seems quite incredible to me.