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The cruise line has made a controversial change that some passengers will love while others will be angry.

During the early days of the cruise industry's comeback from the covid pandemic, Royal Caribbean outlawed smoking in the casino. At the time, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) required passengers to wear masks in public areas of the ship except when eating or drinking while stationary.

Smoking was, at first, a sort of loophole. People would smoke in the casino and remove their masks (or at least move them to the side) while playing slot machines. That basically meant that unlike drinking, where your mask could be moved and then replaced for a sip, smokers were essentially not wearing a mask.

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Royal Caribbean (RCL) - Get Free Report closed that loop by fully outlawing smoking in its casinos while masks were still required. That was something that smokers weren't happy about, but probably understood given how large a role the CDC was playing in setting cruise ship rules.

Once the CDC stopped requiring masks (and regulating cruise ships at all), Royal Caribbean reverted to its pre-pandemic smoking policies. That meant that every casino on its ships had a smoking section. Technically, smoking is only allowed when actually playing a slot machine, but that's hard to enforce and the casinos quickly filled back up with smoke.

Now, the cruise line has officially made a long-rumored move that should make non-smokers really happy while angering a whole different group of the cruise line's passengers.

Oasis-Class Ships Getting Non-Smoking Area

Wonder of the Seas, the newest member of Royal Caribbean's Oasis class was originally built to sail out of China. It was moved to Florida due to the covid pandemic which created a sort of happy accident for non-smokers.

The ship was built with a secondary casino that was originally intended as a high rollers room. Once the ship was repurposed to sail from the United States, that smaller casino was shifted from an area designed to cater to big-money players into a non-smoking casino.

For months, it has been rumored that the cruise line would turn the "Jazz on 4" space -- the same location as the non-smoking "Golden Roon" on Wonder of the Seas -- into similar non-smoking casinos. Royal Caribbean never commented on those rumors, but it did warn passengers on some sailings that service in the Diamond Lounge, an area next to Jazz on 4 reserved for Diamond and higher members of the company's loyalty program, would be disrupted due to construction.

The results of that construction have been revealed on another Oasis-class ship, Harmony of the Seas. Johnny Travalor shared pictures of the new casino in a Facebook group for fans of Royal Caribbean's casinos.

"The brand new non-smoking casino on Harmony officially opened today and I have been here since the opening playing, donating!" he shared.

That's not official confirmation that all Oasis-class ships will have Jazz on 4 turned into a non-smoking casino, but all signs point in that direction.

Royal Caribbean Makes Some Passengers Mad

No change on a cruise ship will make all passengers happy. Some Royal Caribbean gamblers have suggested that the non-smoking area, which is much smaller than the original casino, should be the smoking area.

"Maybe once they see the non-smokers are bursting at the seam in that space and the smoking casino isn’t as crowded they will reverse it," Barb Boyer Green shared.

"That should be the smoking room...seems like the non-smokers are being put in a closet," Maureen Ethier added.

Not all passengers, however, are upset because of the size of the non-smoking area. Some are lamenting the loss of Jazz on 4, which hosted live jazz music.

"I think this is an overall loss, with now an entertainment area being taken over on this ship. I always enjoyed the jazz club and this will do nothing for the smell of the ship, net loss for all passengers" Justin Rogers wrote.

"It was our fav such a sad day. It was our escape, great talent, romantic, not another venue like it. Such a shame," added Julia Doumad.

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Imagine being a policymaker at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. You have to decide which actions to recommend, how much risk to tolerate and what sacrifices to ask your citizens to bear.

Who would you turn to for an accurate prediction about how people would react? Many would recommend going to the experts — social scientists. But we are here to tell you this would be bad advice.

As psychological scientists with decades of combined experience studying decision-making, wisdom, expert judgment and societal change, we hoped social scientists’ predictions would be accurate and useful. But we also had our doubts.

Our discipline has been undergoing a crisis due to failed study replications and questionable research practices. If basic findings can’t be reproduced in controlled experiments, how confident can we be that our theories can explain complex real-world outcomes?

Predicting social change

To find out how well social scientists could predict societal change, we ran the largest forecasting initiative in our field’s history using predictions about change in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic as a test case.

To do this, we tested how well social scientists could predict societal change in two ways. First, we asked social scientists for quick guesses about how things would change over the next two years of the pandemic.

Second, we ran a competition where over 100 teams of social scientists with access to historical data made month-by-month forecasts. We formally assessed their predictions for a range of social sciences phenomena, including changes in prejudice, subjective well-being, violence, individualism and political polarization between May 2020 and May 2021.

Our findings, detailed in peer-reviewed papers in Nature Human Behaviour and in American Psychologist, paint a sobering picture. Despite the causal nature of most theories in the social sciences, and the fields’ emphasis on prediction in controlled settings, social scientists’ forecasts were generally not very good.

In both papers, we found that experts’ predictions were generally no more accurate than those made by samples of the general public. Further, their predictions were often worse than predictions generated by simple statistical models.

Improving predictions

Our studies did still give us reasons to be optimistic. First, forecasts were more accurate when teams had specific expertise in the domain they were making predictions in. If someone was an expert in depression, for example, they were better at predicting societal trends in depression.

Second, when teams were made up of scientists from different fields working together, they tended to do better at forecasting. Finally, teams that used simpler models to generate their predictions and made use of past data generally outperformed those that didn’t.

These findings suggest that, despite the poor performance of the social scientists in our studies, there are steps scientists can take to improve their accuracy at this type of forecasting.

Our research also found that, compared to lay people, social scientists were more aware of the herculean nature of the task at hand. In our studies, they expressed uncertainty and less confidence than lay people when making forecasts.

Similarly, social scientists expressed uncertainty in their open-ended predictions for the World after COVID project, a video series we conducted with eminent scholars in the first year of the pandemic.

Thus, social scientists still have some wisdom to offer, reminding us of the uncertainty and the need for humility when forecasting the future.

A call to action

Our work highlights the importance of developing reliable sources of data and suggests strategies that can improve the accuracy of such forecasts.

These results are a call to action for the scientific community to continue developing better methods for predicting societal change so the public can rely on scientists in times of crisis.

Our projects show that expert prediction of societal change during the COVID-19 pandemic was far from perfect. But they also suggest ways such predictions can be improved. By drawing on specific expertise, collaborating across disciplines and making data-driven models, social scientists can produce more accurate and useful forecasts for policymakers and the public.

The scientific community should strive to develop better methods for predicting societal change, while acknowledging the uncertainty and complexity involved. Policymakers should appreciate the value of expert insight, but also be aware of its limitations and potential biases. If we want to predict the future, or shape it for that matter, than a bit of humility would likely help.

Igor Grossmann receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, Ontario Ministry of Research, Innovation and Science, The John Templeton Foundation, and the Templeton World Charity Foundation.

Cendri Hutcherson receives funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Ontario Ministry of Research and Innovation, and the National Institutes for Mental Health (USA).

Michael Varnum has received funding from the National Science Foundation (USA), the US Fulbright Program, and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation.

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