1) the use of psychoanalytical tools on prominent historical figures such as the Humans Martin Luther or Adolph Hitler. 2) A science originally imagined by the Human, I. Asimov, for his fictional Foundation series. The fictitious scholar Hari Seldon develops methods for accurately modeling the behavior of humans in the aggregate, given a critical number of actors. In addition, psychohistorical knowledge can be used to influence political-economic events by finding critical junctures where a small, precise intervention can predictably produce a large desired result. See also: Cliometrics. Return to alphabetic links

Psychohistory is the name of a fictional science, which combined history, sociology and mathematical statistics, in Isaac Asimov's Foundation universe, to create a (nearly) exact science of the actions of very large groups of people, such as the Galactic Empire. Asimov used the analogy of a gas: in a gas, the motion of a single molecule is very difficult to predict, but the mass action of the gas can be predicted to a high level of accuracy. Asimov applied this concept to the population of the fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered in the quadrillions.