Over the course of the project, the PROFECI team developed a comprehensive framework for analyzing how public projections are constructed, communicated, and received. The project combined theoretical innovation with methodological development, resulting in a robust toolkit for examining future-oriented discourse.
The team identified five key components that make up a projection: the predicted outcome, the estimated likelihood, its evaluation (how good or bad the projected future would be), the anchors (the information or reasoning it is based on), and its behavioral implications (the actions it suggests). These components were studied in both media texts and citizens’ expectations, across cases such as the Israeli, French, and U.S. elections and the COVID-19 pandemic.
PROFECI employed a multi-method approach, including in-depth interviews with journalists, focus groups and panel surveys with citizens, and advanced computational tools capable of detecting and analyzing projections in millions of news and social media texts. These tools were made publicly available, and the project’s outcomes were published in leading academic journals.
Among the project’s key findings are:
(1) While journalists regularly produce future-oriented coverage, they do so with ambivalence—balancing external demands with professional norms by integrating projections into factual reporting or using non-committal language;
(2) In future-oriented news discourse, journalists employ distinct trust-building strategies—such as facticity, authority, and transparency—to present projections as credible, despite the inherent uncertainty involved;
(3) Projections are often co-constructed by multiple actors—especially in hybrid media environments—through processes such as amplification, distillation, elaboration, and contestation, forming complex ecosystems of collective futures;
(4) People’s projections are often shaped more by emotional and identity-based factors—such as wishful thinking—than by factual information;
(5) Different media outlets (e.g. mainstream vs. alternative) contribute to polarized outlooks on the future;
(6) Projections can shape real-world behaviors, such as voter turnout, with optimism fostering political participation—particularly when elections are perceived as competitive.
