The research behind Affective Forecasting
A surprising amount of life depends on predicting how we are going to feel in the future. We choose jobs because we think one will make us happier than another. We move cities, pursue relationships, buy things, end relationships and work towards goals partly because of the emotional future we expect those decisions to create.
Psychologists call this process affective forecasting: predicting our future emotional states. Research by psychologists Daniel Gilbert, Timothy Wilson and others has found that we're reasonably good at predicting the general direction of our reactions. We know that rejection will probably feel worse than acceptance and that getting something we really want will probably feel better than losing it. Where our predictions become less reliable is in estimating how strongly we will feel and how long the feeling will last.
THE EXPERIMENT
In a well-known series of studies published in 1998, Gilbert and his colleagues examined what they called immune neglect: our tendency to underestimate the psychological processes that help us recover from emotional events.
One of their studies involved university professors facing tenure decisions, an unusually useful group for this kind of research because tenure is a major professional event with a clear positive or negative outcome. Assistant professors who had not yet received a tenure decision were asked to predict how happy they would be in the years following either receiving or being denied tenure. The researchers then compared those forecasts with the reported happiness of professors who had already received one of those outcomes.
As expected, professors predicted that receiving tenure would make them happier than being denied it. They were not wrong about which outcome they preferred. What they overestimated was the lasting emotional difference the decision would make. Professors who had actually received tenure were not as permanently elevated by the outcome as people anticipated and those who had been denied tenure were not as persistently unhappy as people predicted they would be.
The researchers found similar patterns across other studies involving romantic relationships, personality feedback and job outcomes. People generally understood whether an event would feel good or bad, but they tended to expect its emotional effects to be more intense and durable than they actually were. Gilbert and Wilson later described this broader tendency as part of the impact bias in affective forecasting.
THE FINDING
The interesting conclusion isn't that people have no idea what will make them happy. That interpretation goes considerably further than the evidence.
If you are choosing between an outcome you strongly want and one you strongly don't want, your prediction about which one will initially feel better is probably quite sensible. The forecasting error tends to appear when we imagine the size and persistence of the emotional effect. We expect the promotion to transform everyday life more than it does. We expect the rejection to remain painful for longer than it does. We imagine finally reaching a goal and underestimate how quickly the extraordinary can begin to feel ordinary. Reviews of affective forecasting research find that people are often more accurate about the valence, or positive versus negative direction, of an emotional response than they are about its intensity and duration.
This matters because our forecasts influence real decisions. If we exaggerate the lasting happiness an outcome will produce, we may be willing to sacrifice more than we otherwise would to obtain it. If we exaggerate the lasting unhappiness of an outcome, we may organize our lives around avoiding something that we would actually be capable of handling.
THE THEORY
Researchers have identified several reasons these forecasts go wrong. One of the most important is focalism, our tendency to focus heavily on the event we are imagining while giving too little attention to everything else that will also be happening in our lives.
Suppose you are considering moving to another city for a job. When you imagine accepting it, your attention naturally goes to the features that make the decision important: the new role, the salary, the apartment, the city and the opportunities the move might create. It is much harder to imagine the thousands of ordinary experiences that will eventually surround those things. You will still sleep badly occasionally, have irritating administrative tasks, talk to friends, buy groceries, get stuck in traffic, have good weekends and bad Tuesdays. The major event becomes one part of a life containing many other sources of emotion.
Wilson and colleagues demonstrated the role of focalism experimentally. In one study, asking people to think more broadly about the other everyday events that would occupy their future reduced the extremity of their emotional forecasts. The target event had not become less important. Participants were simply forecasting it within the context of an entire life rather than imagining it in isolation.
Another mechanism is immune neglect. Gilbert and colleagues used the term "psychological immune system" to describe the collection of processes through which people make sense of, reinterpret and adapt to difficult experiences. When imagining something bad happening, we tend to focus on the event itself while underestimating what our future selves will do in response. We seek support, develop new routines, find explanations, redirect our attention and gradually become accustomed to circumstances that initially felt overwhelming.
NOT THE SAME THING
Affective forecasting errors do not mean that circumstances don't matter
It would be easy to take this research and turn it into the claim that nothing external really makes us happy or unhappy because people eventually adapt to everything. That isn't what the research shows.
Events can have substantial and sometimes lasting effects on well-being. Some circumstances are objectively preferable to others and some losses permanently alter people's lives. Affective forecasting research does not suggest that every emotional experience disappears or that everyone adapts completely to every situation.
The narrower finding is that when we mentally simulate the future, we don't reproduce that future perfectly. We tend to place disproportionate attention on the event we are currently considering and insufficient attention on adaptation, coping and the many other experiences that will eventually compete for our attention. Our forecasts can therefore exaggerate the emotional dominance of a single outcome.
WHY IT MATTERS
Affective forecasting becomes particularly useful when thinking about the things we believe will finally change how life feels.
There is nothing irrational about wanting a better job, a relationship, a beautiful home, financial security or recognition for something you've worked hard to achieve. Many of these things genuinely can improve a life. The research simply gives us reason to be cautious about assigning any single outcome too much responsibility for our future emotional state.
The same principle applies in the opposite direction. We sometimes treat an unwanted outcome as though it will permanently divide life into before and after. Not getting the job, being rejected, making an embarrassing mistake or having a plan fail can feel enormous when viewed from the present because our imagined future is dominated by that one fact. What is harder to picture is the future in which the event has become one fact among many.
This may be one reason major decisions are so difficult to evaluate purely by asking Which option will make me happiest? The emotional forecasts involved in answering that question are imperfect. It can be useful to consider other questions alongside it: Which option fits my values? What kind of ordinary day would each choice create? What trade-offs am I willing to make? What would still matter to me after the novelty of the outcome had faded?
Those questions don't require predicting exactly how happy your future self will be. They ask you to evaluate the shape of the life around the feeling too.
TRY THIS
When you catch yourself thinking that a future event will make everything substantially better or substantially worse, try putting the event back into the context of an ordinary day.
Imagine yourself six months after it happens. Instead of concentrating only on the promotion, move, breakup, purchase or achievement, think through the rest of that day. Where do you wake up? What do you do in the morning? Who do you talk to? What occupies your afternoon? What minor frustrations are still there? What parts of your life haven't changed at all?
The goal isn't to convince yourself that the event doesn't matter. It may matter enormously. The exercise simply corrects for something our forecasts tend to leave out: whatever happens, the rest of your life will be happening too.
References
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.
Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 131-134.
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.