Wilson & Gilbert 2005- CD Affective Forecasting

Affective Forecasting Knowing What to Want Timothy D. Wilson 1 and Daniel T. Gilbert 2 1 University of Virginia, 2 Harvard University ABSTRACT— People base many decisions on affective fore- casts, predictions about their emotional reactions to future events. They often display an impact bias , overestimating the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to such events. One cause of the impact bias is focalism , the tendency to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts and feelings. Another is people’s failure to anticipate how quickly they will make sense of things that happen to them in a way that speeds emotional recovery. This is especially true when predicting reactions to negative events: People fail to anticipate how quickly they will cope psychologically with such events in ways that speed their recovery from them. Several implications are discussed, such as the tendency for people to attribute their unexpected resilience to external agents. KEYWORDS— affectiveforecasting;prediction;emotion;sense making Manycultures havemyths inwhichpeoplecanmaketheirwishes come true. The story of Aladdin and his lamp is best known to readers of the Arabian Nights (and to Disney fans); in Irish leg- ends, it is leprechauns who make wishes come true; whereas in a Chinesefableitisanobligingdragonthathastheheadofacamel, the eyes of a hare, the neck of a snake, the claws of an eagle, and the ears of a buffalo (McNeil, 2003). Common to these myths is the notion that if people (perhaps with the help of a genie) could make their wishes come true, they would achieve everlasting happiness. Sometimes, however, people are disappointed by the very things they think they want. Research on affective forecasting has shown that people routinely mispredict how much pleasure or displeasure future events will bring and, as a result, sometimes work to bring about events that do not maximize their happiness. These mispredictions can take a number of forms. People can be wrong about how positive or negative their reactions to future events will be, particularly if what unfolds is different from what they had imagined. Prospective dog owners might predict that Rover will bring nothing but joy because they picture a faithful companion who obediently fetches the newspaper each morning insteadofanobstinatebeastwhochewsshoesanddemands6:00- a.m. walks in the freezing rain. Generally, however, humans are adept at predicting whether events are likely to be pleasant or unpleasant.Evenaratcanreadily learnthatpressingonebarwill produce a food pellet and another an electric shock and will vote withitspawsforthemorepleasantoption.Peopleknowthataroot beer will be more pleasant than a root canal. Peoplearelessadeptatpredictingtheintensityanddurationof their future emotional reactions. Occasionally they underesti- mate intensity and duration; this may happen, for example, when apersonisina‘‘cold’’emotionalstateatthetimeofpredictionand is trying to imagine being in a ‘‘hot’’ emotional state in the future. Satiated shoppers underestimate how much they will want ice creamlaterintheweek,andaddictswhohavejustinjectedheroin underestimate how much they will crave the drug when they are deprived of it later (Gilbert, Gill, & Wilson, 2002; Loewenstein, O’Donoghue, & Rabin, 2003). THE IMPACT BIAS More common than underestimating future emotional reactions, however, is the impact bias , whereby people overestimate the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to future events—even when they know what the future event is likely to entail and they are not in a particularly ‘‘hot’’ or ‘‘cold’’ emotional state at the time of making their forecast. This error has been foundrepeatedlyinavarietyofpopulationsandcontexts.College students overestimated how happy or unhappy they would be after being assigned to a desirable or undesirable dormitory (see Fig. 1), people overestimated how unhappy they would be 2 months after the dissolution of a romantic relationship, unten- ured college professors overestimated how unhappy they would be 5 years after being denied tenure, women overestimated how unhappy they would be upon receiving unwanted results from a Address correspondence to Timothy D. Wilson, P.O. Box 400400, 102 Gilmer Hall, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA 22904-4400, e-mail: twilson@virginia.edu, or to Daniel Gilbert, Department of Psychology, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street, Harvard Uni- versity, Cambridge, MA, 02138, e-mail: gilbert@wjh.harvard.edu. CURRENT DIRECTIONS IN PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE Volume 14—Number 3 131 Copyright r 2005 American Psychological Society

pregnancy test, and so on (see Loewenstein et al., 2003; Mellers & McGraw, 2001; Wilson & Gilbert, 2003). The impact bias is important because, when deciding what to work for, people need to predict not only the valence (positivity or negativity) of their emotional reactions (‘‘Will I feel good or bad?’’), but also the intensity and duration of these reactions (e.g., ‘‘Will I feel good for a few seconds or a few months?’’). If consumers overestimate the intensity and duration of the pleasure they will get from purchasing a new car, for example, they may be better off spending their money in some other way. One cause of the impact bias is focalism , the tendency to overestimatehowmuchwewillthinkabouttheeventinthefuture and to underestimate the extent to which other events will in- fluence our thoughts and feelings (Schkade & Kahneman, 1998; Wilson, Wheatley, Meyers, Gilbert, & Axsom, 2000). When football fans think about how they will feel after their favorite teamwinsanimportantgame,forexample,theyarelikelytofocus exclusivelyonthegameandneglecttothinkaboutthemanyother things—such as upcoming deadlines at work, the need to get the car fixed, or a visit from old family friends—that will influence their thoughts and feelings. Focalism is a straightforward and, we suspect, quite common source of the impact bias. It can be cor- rected, to some degree, by asking people to think carefully about the many other events that will demand their attention in the future; studies have found that this exercise tempers people’s predictions about the impact of a victory or loss by their favorite football team on their happiness (Wilson et al., 2000). SENSE MAKING AND PEOPLE’S IGNORANCE OF IT Another cause of the impact bias is that forecasters fail to rec- ognize how readily they will make sense of novel or unexpected events once they happen. Research across a variety of fields suggests that such events trigger four processes in sequence: attention, reaction, explanation, and adaptation. ± First, people are especially likely to attend to events that are self-relevant but poorly understood. For example, a student who unexpectedly receives an A on an important exam will initially think about little else. ± Second, people react emotionally to self-relevant, poorly understood events. The student who receives an unexpected A will initially feel overjoyed. ± Third, people attempt to explain or make sense of self-rele- vant, poorly understood events. For example, the overjoyed student will begin to search for reasons why she received a better-than-expected grade. ± Fourth, by making sense of events, people adapt emotionally to them. Once the student has explained the reasons for her grade, she will think about her achievement less and expe- riencelesshappinesswhenshedoesthinkaboutit.Theevent will come to be seen as more normal and inevitable then it actually was, and hence it will lose some of the emotional power that it had when it still seemed extraordinary. These four processes may seem relatively uncontroversial to psychologists, but research suggests that people neglect to take them into account when forecasting their future emotions. In particular, because the processes by which people explain or make sense of unexpected events are often quick and noncon- scious, people do not recognize beforehand that such processes will occur; thus they do not consider how quickly their tendency to explain events will reduce the impact of those events. When a student tries to predict how she will feel if she receives an un- expected A , she has little trouble imagining herself feeling overjoyed but a lot of trouble imagining herself explaining the event in a way that makes it seem ordinary and predictable. The Pleasure of Uncertainty About Positive Events If making sense of positive events reduces the duration of the pleasure they cause, then inhibiting the sense-making process should prolong people’s pleasure. In one study, for example, students who were studying in a library were unexpectedly given an index card with a dollar coin attached, and results showed that they were in a better mood 5 minutes later if the text on the card made it difficult rather than easy for them toexplain why they had received the money. Yet people did not anticipate this effect; in fact, ‘‘forecaster’’ participants predicted that they would be happier if the card made explanation easy rather than difficult (Wilson, Centerbar, Kermer, & Gilbert, 2005). People do not realize how quickly they will make sense of unexpected positive 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Desirable Undesirable Desirability of Dormitory Happiness Rating Predicted Actual Fig. 1. College students’ predicted and actual levels of happiness after dormitory assignments. Participants predicted what their overall level of happiness would be a year later if they were randomly assigned to a de- sirable or undesirable dormitory(on a 7-pointscale, with1 5 unhappy and 7 5 happy ). Students predicted that their dormitory assignment would have a large positive or negative impact on their overall happiness (solid bars);butayearlater,thoselivinginundesirableanddesirabledormitories were at nearly identical levels of happiness (open bars). Adapted from Dunn, Wilson, & Gilbert (2003). 132 Volume 14—Number 3 Affective Forecasting

± It is well-known that people weigh potential losses more heavily than corresponding gains, which often leads to eco- nomically illogical decisions. Kermer, Driver-Linn, Wilson, and Gilbert (2005), for example, found that most people re- fused a gamble in which they had a 50% of winning $5 and a 50% chance of losing only $3, demonstrating classic loss aversion. Loss aversion seems to involve a faulty affective forecast: Although participants predicted that losing a gam- ble would have a larger emotional impact than winning, they were wrong; the magnitude of unhappiness caused by losing was no greater than the magnitude of happiness caused by winning (Kermer et al., 2005). SUMMARYAND FUTURE DIRECTIONS Affective forecasts are important because people base many decisions on them. Decisions about who to marry, what career to pursue, and whether to donate money to the local homeless shelter are based, at least in part, on predictions about how these decisions will make one feel. To the extent that people’s predic- tions about what will make them happy are flawed, people fail at maximizing their happiness. One unanswered question is whether the impact bias is ad- vantageous in some way. It could be argued that exaggerating the impact of emotional events serves as a motivator, making people workhardtoobtainthingsthattheypredictwillhavelargepositive consequences and avoid things that they predict will have large negative consequences. It may be, however, that overestimating the impact of negative events creates unnecessary dread and anxiety about the future. And there are other costs to affective- forecasting errors. People suffering from debilitating digestive disorders who underestimate how quickly they will adapt to an ostomy bag might make less-than-optimal treatment decisions. People who overestimate the positive emotional impact of un- dergoing cosmetic surgery might be too willing to get an extreme makeover. Finding ways to increase the accuracy of affective forecasts is a worthy enterprise—though not, we suspect, a par- ticularlyeasy one(Ubeletal.,2001).Itisdifficult toplace oneself inthefutureandimaginewhatitwillbeliketohavemadesenseof an event that, in the present, seems extraordinary. Such mental time traveling,however,mightultimatelyleadtobetterdecisions. Recommended Reading Gilbert, D.T., Driver-Linn, E., & Wilson, T.D. (2002). The trouble with Vronsky: Impact bias in the forecasting of future affective states. In L.F. Barrett & P. Salovey (Eds.), The wisdom in feeling: Psycho- logical processes in emotional intelligence (pp. 114–143). New York: Guilford. Loewenstein, G., O’Donoghue, T. and Rabin, M. (2003). (See Refer- ences) Mellers, B.A., & McGraw, A.P. (2001). (See References) Wilson, T.D. (2002). Strangers to ourselves: Discovering the adaptive unconscious . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, T.D., & Gilbert, D.T. (2003). (See References) Acknowledgments— Much of the research discussed in this article was supported by research grant #RO1-MH56075 from the National Institute of Mental Health to the authors. REFERENCES Dunn, E.W., Wilson, T.D., & Gilbert, D.T. (2003). Location, location, location: The misprediction of satisfaction in housing lotteries. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin , 29 , 1421–1432. Gilbert, D.T., Brown, R.A., Pinel, E.C., & Wilson, T.D. (2000). The il- lusion of external agency. Journal of Personality and Social Psy- chology , 79 , 690–700. Gilbert, D.T., & Ebert, J.E. (2002). Decisions and revisions: The affec- tive forecasting of changeable outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 82 , 503–514. Gilbert, D.T., Gill, M., & Wilson, T.D. (2002). The future is now: Tem- poral correction in affective forecasting. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes , 88 , 430–444. Gilbert, D.T., Lieberman, M.D., Morewedge, C., & Wilson, T.D. (2004). The peculiar longevity of things not so bad. Psychological Science , 15 , 14–19. Gilbert, D.T., Pinel, E.C., Wilson, T.D., Blumberg, S.J., & Wheatley, T.P. (1998). Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affec- tive forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 75 , 617–638. Kermer, D.A., Driver-Linn, E., Wilson, T.D., & Gilbert, D.T. (2005). Loss aversion applies to predictions more than experience . Unpublished raw data, University of Virginia. Loewenstein,G., O’Donoghue,T.,&Rabin,M. (2003).Projection bias in predicting future utility. Quarterly Journal of Economics , 118 , 1209–1248. Mellers, B.A., & McGraw, A.P. (2001). Anticipated emotions as guides to choice. Current Directions in Psychological Science , 10 , 210–214. McNeil, D.G. Jr. (2003, April 29). Dragons, a brief history in long miles. New York Times (p. F2). Schkade, D.A., & Kahneman, D. (1998). Does living in California make people happy? A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction. Psychological Science , 9 , 340–346. Ubel, P.A., Loewenstein, G., Hershey, J., Baron, J., Mohr, T., Asch, D., & Jepson, C. (2001). Do nonpatients underestimate the quality of life associated with chronic health conditions because of a focusing illusion? Medical Decision Making , 21 , 190–199. Wilson, T.D., Centerbar,D.B., Kermer, D.A., & Gilbert, D.T.(2005). The pleasures ofuncertainty:Prolongingpositive moodsinwayspeople donotanticipate. JournalofPersonalityandSocialPsychology , 88 , 5–21. Wilson,T.D.,&Gilbert,D.T.(2003).Affectiveforecasting.InM.P.Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 35, pp. 345–411). San Diego, CA: Academic Press. Wilson, T.D., Wheatley, T.P., Meyers, J.M., Gilbert, D.T., & Axsom, D. (2000). Focalism: A Source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 78 , 821–836. 134 Volume 14—Number 3 Affective Forecasting