Affective Forecasting: Predicting Non-Formulaic Emotions¶
Lindsey Chou & David Vacek
Affective forecasting is the (often flawed) process of attempting to predict one’s emotional state in the future. For example, when striving towards a career, rejecting or dismissing other sources of happiness—such as relationships, friendships, family, hobbies or travel—may seem like a rational sacrifice in order to achieve success. However, what happens once you become successful? How long does this happiness remain intact? Although many expect that achieving their goals will grant them life-long happiness, this happiness tends to diminish more quickly than one might expect.
Failures in affective forecasting may occur when people try to predict their emotions after a variety of different events. For example, one study conducted by Dunn et. al. (2003) asked students to predict their happiness one year after receiving their university dorm assignment. Although they believed their assignment would have a major impact on their happiness, students did not report any significant difference in happiness the following year. Another study conducted by Gilbert et. al. (1998) demonstrated how assistant professors thought their tenure decisions would have major impacts on their happiness, when actual professors who did or did not receive tenure reported similar levels of happiness. These studies demonstrate how people tend to believe that certain events will have a larger, and often longer, effect on their emotions than they truly do.
Though we have tried to unlock the dynamics of emotions after a decision that could help us understand the emotional drive in making present and future decisions, research has found one factor after another that demonstrates why predicting emotions — affective forecasting — is so challenging.
Immune Neglect¶
The psychological immune system is a collective term used to describe the cognitive mechanisms that help reduce our experience of negative affective states. One example of this is denial, which one might employ when receiving bad news, such as their significant other cheating on them. Rather than suffer from the negative emotions that might come from this betrayal, one way that our psychological immune system might attempt to reduce this negative experience is by denying that it happened in the first place. Even when one ultimately learns to accept their misfortune, our psychological immune system often finds ways to view negative events in a positive light. In this way, our psychological immune system helps bring our affective states toward homeostasis.
Our psychological immune system manifests itself in our everyday lives. Doing something embarrassing seems much worse in the moment than it does weeks, even days afterwards. The euphoria one might feel after winning a competition or completing a passion project may be profound in the moment, but becomes less intense as time goes on. The psychological immune system works best when we are not paying attention to it, and thus people generally overlook the fact that their psychological immune system exists to regulate their emotions — people suffer from immune neglect which contributes to their tendency to overestimate the duration of their affective reactions. Immune neglect is the tendency for people to overlook the cognitive mechanisms that help them to cope with and adapt to negative experiences or events. This results in a durability bias, or our misbelief that powerful events must have long-standing emotional consequences, when our emotions actually have a tendency to revert to normal quicker than expected.
Gilbert et. al. (1998) conducted one of the hallmark studies on immune neglect. Researchers had participants report on their general happiness, whether they were currently in a romantic relationship, and whether they had experienced a breakup. They then asked participants to predict how happy they would feel after a breakup. Results showed that those who had never experienced a breakup (referred to as “luckies”) predicted that the breakup would leave them significantly less happy than those who had actually experienced a breakup before (unfortunately referred to as the “leftovers”). In other words, Gilbert et. al. demonstrated how people believe that the dissolution of a romantic relationship will have a greater impact on their happiness than it actually does. Further studies demonstrate how this overestimation of negative affect is much greater than the underestimation of positive affect; people make larger affective forecasting errors related to negative emotions over positive emotions. This supports the idea of immune neglect, as the psychological immune system is especially designed to ease our negative emotions.
So, why do people tend to neglect their psychological immune system? Although there is no definite answer to this question, Gilbert et. al. propose three helpful approaches to understanding why people may not consider the power of their immune system. First, if people were always aware of their psychological immune system, they may begin to devalue their desired outcomes. This is because they might think about how the happiness they would feel from achieving said outcome is only fleeting, and thus be less encouraged to attain it. Second, being hyper aware of one’s immune system may inadvertently suppress it. Third, if people believe that their immune system will help ameliorate all their negative feelings, they may be less inclined to take conscious action to improve themselves. They may feel that they can rely on solely emotion-focused coping (learning to regulate one’s negative emotions) rather than problem-focused coping (dealing with the external source of one’s problems), both important methods of reducing negative affect (Lazarus, 1985). Furthermore, even when people do realize that they have mispredicted their affective states (e.g. realizing that a experiencing a breakup wasn’t so bad), they may attribute this to other factors besides their psychological immune system (e.g. believing they must have not liked their significant other all that much). Each of these are potential reasons why people remain generally unaware of, or at least do not actively think about, their psychological immune system.
Focalism¶
Another contributor to errors in affective forecasting is focalism. When making affective forecasts, people often focus much more on the single event in question and overlook the impact of subsequent events. To test this phenomena, Wilson et. al. (2000) conducted a study where they asked college football fans to predict how the outcome of a college football game would affect their happiness. One group of participants was asked to complete a “prospective” diary of all the time they thought they might spend on future activities after the football game, whereas another group was merely asked to think about the football game outcome. They found that fans who completed the prospective diary were less likely to overpredict their emotions than the control group. These findings demonstrate how thinking about multiple events, rather than one focal event, may help people moderate their affective forecasts.
To see if this effect would differ depending on whether the subsequent events people thought of brought negative, positive, or neutral emotions, Wilson et. al (2000) conducted another study similar to the previous. In this study, people were still asked to complete diary entries; however, one group was asked to think about future activities with mixed connotations (e.g. socializing with friends, attending their least favorite class, or cooking), whereas the other group was only asked to think about neutral activities (e.g. cooking and watching TV). For both groups, thinking about other activities was equally effective in reducing affective forecasting errors. This demonstrates how thinking about the emotional impact of subsequent events is not what reduces affective forecasting errors, but rather that “people who think about future events moderate their forecasts because they believe that these events will occupy their thoughts and reduce thinking about the focal event” (Wilson et. al., 2000). In other words, people who have multiple events on their mind are less likely to overestimate the emotional impact of a single event.
The effect of focalism is closely related to the planning fallacy, or the idea that people often underestimate how long it will take them to complete future tasks. One reason for this phenomenon is cognitive: people tend to focus on the future task itself, overlooking or minimizing their past experiences with similar tasks. Another reason is motivation: people want to believe that they will be able to get their task done efficiently, discounting potential obstacles to completing their task. The planning fallacy is compounded by people’s tendencies to focus on single events, as well as “wishful thinking” that they will be able to put all their energy forth into a single task at hand.
Loss Aversion¶
Biases in affective forecasting can also explain some aspects of loss aversion. A study conducted by Kermer et. al revealed that people predicted that their gambling losses would have a greater and longer emotional impact than gambling gains, even when the loss and gain were of the same magnitude. However, when they were asked how they felt later on, their losses did not have as great an emotional impact as they had initially forecasted. This again reflects a discounting of their psychological immune system, as people underestimate their tendencies to rationalize losses and overestimate their tendencies to dwell on their losses.
Retrospective Impact Bias¶
The principles of impact biases are simple - people tend to overestimate the significance of events on their future emotional states. And, because we as humans love being rewarded, we tend to have a general bias to events that sparked positive emotions. Specifically, this impact bias is reflected in a person’s exaggerated prediction of positive or negative emotional responses to either positive or negative events respectively. But, after a positive event people may actually not feel as happy as they had predicted, or after a negative event people may actually not feel as sad as they had predicted. People also predict their future reactions to events based on learning from their past reactions: retrospectively reflecting on previous incidence and perhaps learning that one truly was not as unhappy as they had worried about a particular event.
Wilson et al. (2003) concluded that such biases exist because we consider events in isolation, and neglect to take into account other factors or variables in our lives that might affect our emotions shortly after or that might help us rationalize the events and our emotions. Rationalization of events most significantly negates the effects of retrospective impact bias, since we actively comprehend our emotional response, good or bad, to particular events. Telling ourselves, ‘this break-up did not hurt so bad, I was able to refocus my time at the gym, and call my family more often,’ is comforting and logically dampens the negative emotions from a break-up. This new understanding would help us recalibrate our impact bias for future events, limiting the over exaggerated predictions of our events.
But, this aforementioned learning, known as rationalized learning, in the human psyche is limited, as described by Wilson et al. (2003). And, retrospective bias is a vital feedback tool for our learning of what is good or bad, what we enjoy or not so much, or what we believe is right or wrong. Overestimation of future positive events is a motivator, making rewards slightly larger to push one to keep working, while overestimation of future negative events may drive a person’s reasonable risk averse attitude. Fundamentally, impact bias is shaping our personalities by reinforcing events we positively react to by repetition and breaking down events we negatively react to.
Changeability of Decisions¶
People love flexibility and generally avoid commitment when under pressure to decide between choices. Given the option of changeability, or an alternative set of decisions in which one can change their decision a number of times before selecting, our choices suddenly become much easier because changeability fulfills our need for flexibility. Hence, when one is met with a choice, we immediately believe that we will feel much more satisfied given a changeable option as we are comforted by the notion that we are not committed if we stop feeling happy. Perhaps, according to one of the hypotheses in Gilbert et al. (2002), it is because the additional flexibility makes us feel we have all the other options still available to us.
However, when options are unchangeable and hard decisions are made by a certain deadline, people’s true post-decision happiness is greater as we feel more confident with the result. The implicit understanding that one’s choice is final perhaps does two things - one rationalizes their choice more thoroughly prior to the decision, and one settles into their committed choice by comforting themselves that it was a good choice. Hence, Gilbert et al. (2002) conclude that people overestimate their happiness when presented with flexible choices and truly feel greater happiness when committed to an unchangeable choice.
This juxtaposition of changeability offering pre-decision aspirations for happiness while commitment offers true post-decision happiness is exploitable, and executed by major retailers. In Gilbert et al. (2002), they describe that by offering free returns on merchandise, no matter how stringent their return policies may be, they entice customers to shop with them rather than with their competitors who do not offer returns. Having returns advertises the positive pre-decision emotions associated with ‘flexibility,’ which is vital to shopping in which most of the time is spent trying to make a decision in the pre-decision phase. So, if one is to be more happy with a choice - resist the urge for flexibility and ignore the options for changeability.
Intensity Bias and Temporal Focus¶
The intensity of one’s emotional state in response varies with how narrow or wide one’s perspective of the event is with relation to one’s past states, conditions, and experiences, or their temporal focus: the engagement with thoughts or events at a certain relative time point, a focus that is narrow or wide, or in the past, present or future.
In their study, Buehler et al. (2001) found that people generally demonstrate stronger emotions when an event is associated strongly to a certain time point than when the event is associated with past experiences. When presented with a choice in the future, not considering past experiences in their decision may generate unrealistic positive aspirations and motivate people to pursue the wrong goals, or it causes someone to over-worry about certain future negative events.
And Buehler et al. (2001) observed that people often mispredict the chronology of events - suggesting that their organization with respect to past experiences is irrelevant and their temporal focus is narrowed to an event and its time of occurrence. Hence, this limits our capability of predicting accurately our emotional response to future events.
Miniquiz¶
Check your understanding of the concept of affective forecasting using this miniquiz:
https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1bK7OF-daKaNjrPy2saJcwcQTQFXKzpPt?usp=sharing
References¶
Buehler, R., & McFarland, C. (2001). Intensity Bias in Affective Forecasting: The Role of Temporal Focus. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27(11), 1480–1493. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672012711009
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(11), 1421–1432. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167203256867
Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. P. (1998). Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(3), 617–638. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.75.3.617
Gilbert, D. T., & Ebert, J. E. J. (2002). Decisions and revisions: The affective forecasting of changeable outcomes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(4), 503–514. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.82.4.503
Kermer, D. A., Driver-Linn, E., Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2006). Loss Aversion Is an Affective Forecasting Error. Psychological Science, 17(8), 649–653. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01760.x
Wilson, T. D., Wheatley, T., 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(5), 821–836. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.78.5.821
Wilson, T. D., Meyers, J., & Gilbert, D. T. (2003). “How Happy Was I, Anyway?” A Retrospective Impact Bias. Social Cognition, 21(6), 421–446. https://doi.org/10.1521/soco.21.6.421.28688