You make a lot of decisions based on how you think they will
make you feel in the future. Car dealers
ask you to think about how happy you’ll be driving a beautiful new car. Ads for cruises ask you to think about how
great you’ll feel after a relaxing vacation.
On the flip side, people work hard for a new promotion believing that if
they don’t advance in their career, they will be devastated.
The evidence is pretty clear, though, that big positive and
negative events don’t have an enormous impact on people’s happiness. In a 1998 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Dan Gilbert, Tim
Wilson, and their colleagues found that college faculty being evaluated for
tenure believed they would be quite unhappy if they were denied tenure. Several months after their tenure decision,
though, college faculty who had been denied tenure were no less happy than
those who had gotten tenure.
This finding that we believe that future positive and
negative events have a bigger impact on our future happiness than they do is
called an affective forecasting error. One thing about these errors that is not well
understood is why they don’t go away over time.
We all have experience with these errors. As a kid, I remember toys that I really
wanted to get because I had seen them in a catalog. When I actually got one of those toys,
though, it was never quite the life-changing experience I expected. So, why didn’t examples like this get rid of
these affective forecasting errors?
This question was explored in a November 2010 paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General paper
by Tom Meyvis, Rebecca Ratner, and Jonathan Levav.
These researchers find that people have difficulty
remembering their initial prediction for how they would feel after a positive
or negative event. In one study, they
asked voters in the 2008 election how they would feel a week after the election
if Barack Obama won. Supporters of John
McCain rated that they would be quite unhappy.
A week after the election, these same voters were contacted again and
asked how happy they were. They were
also asked to recall how happy they said they would be when they predicted it
before the election. These voters were
significantly happier than they predicted they would be (that is the affective
forecasting error). They also remembered
their prediction as being less extreme than it was. That is, they did not remember predicting
that they would be very unhappy.
The researchers demonstrated that this poor memory for
previous predictions makes it hard for people to learn to predict better in the
future. In this study, some people were
reminded of their initial prediction, and those people who were reminded of
what they actually predicted showed smaller affective forecasting errors in the
future.
In the first session of the experiment, people ranked their
preference for flavors of jellybeans, and then were asked how much they would
enjoy eating jellybeans that they liked moderately well after eating either a
jellybean that they really like or one that they don’t like much at all. People usually predicted that they would like
a moderate jellybean less after eating one they really like than after eating
one they don’t like at all. (This is
called a contrast effect.)
People came back for a second session, and actually ate
sequences of jellybeans and rated their enjoyment. As it turns out, preference for jellybeans
isn’t affected at all by the one you just ate, and so there was an affected
forecasting error. The participants were
able to look at their ratings and see that they enjoyed the jellybean equally
well regardless of what else they ate.
One group of participants was then shown their original prediction
(which showed that they expected a difference in enjoyment). The other group was not reminded of their
original prediction.
Then, everyone did a similar task. They ranked a series of ice cream
flavors. Then, they were asked how much
they would enjoy eating a flavor they like moderately well either after having
a spoonful of an ice cream they really enjoy or after having a spoonful they do
not like at all. Obviously, this
judgment is quite similar to the one about the jellybeans.
Those people who were reminded of their original judgment
with the jellybeans correctly predicted that their enjoyment of ice cream would
not be affected much by what they had eaten before. Those who were not reminded of their earlier
judgment predicted that their enjoyment of the ice cream would be influenced by
the flavor they ate before. So, those
people who were not given a reminder still showed an affective forecasting
error.
Overall, then, it seems like we continue to mis-predict how
events will affect our future happiness because we have difficulty remembering
the predictions we make.
Do these affective forecasting errors really matter? In fact, these errors may be both a blessing
and a curse.
On the positive side, it can be motivating to be very
concerned about a future event. College
faculty approaching tenure are often quite productive in the years before their
evaluation, because they believe that the outcome of this decision will have a
huge influence on their career. Even
though the actual tenure decision won’t influence their future happiness much,
this hard work may still lay important groundwork for their research in years
to come.
On the negative side, though, these affective forecasting
errors can also lead to bad decisions.
If you really believe that a sports car will make you happier, you may
overpay to own it. That means that you
will spend a lot of money on a purchase that ultimately won’t affect your
happiness that much.
On balance, then, it is probably best to remember that there
are lots of factors that affect how happy you will be in the future, and that
no single event will have that big an influence on that happiness.
