A trend is a general tendency or direction that a process, product, or condition is developing or changing toward. This can be anything from fashion trends to economic indicators, and it can also refer to political trends.
Using this information, business professionals can make more accurate predictions for new products and items. This is because it helps them develop the best possible product to align with the target market’s needs and desires.
When analyzing data, forecasters often plot points of interest onto a graph to identify trends. These may be linear patterns that show a consistent rate of sales or exponential patterns that depict rapid growth.
Understanding these patterns can help you predict if a trend is likely to continue or not. For example, if a stock price is steadily climbing, it would be considered an uptrend. However, if it starts to fall rapidly, it could be a downtrend.
Extrapolating a trend is a type of inductive inference that occurs when a person believes that a certain set of observations will continue to exist or change over time (Harvey & Bolger, 1996; Harvey & Reimers, 2013; Lewandowsky, 2011). It is reasonable to extrapolate a trend when based on a large number of values or if the mechanism that causes the increase or decrease is well understood.
This is because people typically assume that the current situation will be like the past, which means that they believe that an increasing or decreasing trend is likely to continue. In other words, they think that a higher value will be predicted at the same time as a lower one (Harvey & Reimers, 2013; Lewandowsky, 2011, Svenson, 1991).
In the present study, we examined the extent to which participants projected trend information from a single expert prediction to the future. Specifically, we asked participants whether they thought that Knutsen’s last estimate would serve as a “best guess” of her future estimates in either an increase or decrease condition.
Results indicated that participants in all conditions believed that the difference between T1 and T2 might be interpreted as a trend that would continue into the future. In the increase condition, 70% of participants thought the next risk estimate would be even higher, and in the decrease condition as many as 75% believed that it would be lower.
This finding is similar to the findings that people extrapolate trends in other situations, such as natural phenomena or climate changes, and suggests that predicting trend information derived from one expert prediction might be more rational than relying on two predictions made by different experts. This is because people may be influenced by autocorrelations in a time series, or they might have more experience with the topic than does the expert.
