Article summary with Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want by Wilson & Gilbert

What is this article about?

This article explains affective forecasting and the impact bias. People often base their decisions on affective forecasts. Affective forecasts are predictions about their emotional reactions to future events.

In this affective forecasting, they often display an impact bias, meaning they overestimate the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to such events. 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.

One cause of this is focalism. Focalism is the tendency to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts and feelings. Another cause is people's failure to anticipate how quickly they can make sense of things that happen to them in a way that speeds up their emotional recovery. This is especially true for negative events.

What is the impact bias?

The impact bias makes people overestimate the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to future events. This even happens when people are not in any extreme emotional state at the time of making their forecast. It also happens to both the happy and the unhappy feeling that is an expected result of some future event. Marketing is also based on this impact bias; you will be extremely happy if you buy this product and extremely unhappy if you don't. We are tended to buy into these sentiments.

What is focalism?

A cause of the impact bias is focalism. Focalism is the tendency to overestimate how much we will think about the event in the future and to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts and feelings; only this specific event will have a great influence on our whole future. This focalism can be corrected to some degree by asking people to think carefully about the many other events that will demand their attention in the future. This was found in research by Wilson et al. in 2000.

How does sense making and people's ignorance of it work?

Another cause of the impact bias is that people fail to recognize how readily they will make sense of novel or unexpected events once they happen. This happens in attention, reaction, explanation, and adaption. First, people are likely to attend to events that are self-relevant but poorly understood. All our attention will be drawn to unexpected results or events. Second, people react emotionally to self-relevant, poorly understood events. Third, people attempt to explain or make sense of self-relevant, poorly understood events. Fourth, by making sense of events, people adapt emotionally to them.

Think about this for the example of a student who unexpectedly receives an A on an exam. The student will initially think of little else and feel overjoyed. Then the student will begin to search for reasons when she received a better-than-expected grade. After she has found explanations, she will think about it less and experience less happiness when she does think about it.

Research suggests that people neglect to take these four processes into account when forecasting their future emotions. Beforehand, a student will believe they would be super happy about getting an A, but this happiness fades away quickly when she actually receives this good grade.

What is the pleasure paradox?

Making sense of positive events reduces the duration of the pleasure they cause. This would mean that inhibiting the sense-making process should prolong people's pleasure. There was a study by Wilson, Centerbar, Kermer, and Gilbert in 2005 where people were given an index card with a dollar coin attached. The participants predicted that they would be happier if the card explained why they received a dollar, but it turned out the participants that could not decipher why they received a dollar, were happier than the participants who got an explanation. People do not realize that making sense of unexpected positive events will make their positive emotions dissipate. The pleasure paradox refers to our idea that understanding events will make us feel better, when explanation actually drains things of their hedonic qualities that caused us to try and make sense of them in the first place.

How does the impact bias work on negative events?

People are motivated to recover from negative emotional events and coping, psychological defences, and rationalization are forms of sense making. These defences are largely unconcious. Because people are generally unaware of the operation of these defences, they tend not to take them into account when predicting their emotional reactions. This oversight is called immune neglect. 

Immune neglect is people's failure to anticipate their natural tendency to make the best of bad outcomes. This immune neglect has some important consequences:

• Because people do not recognize that they have reduced the impact of negative events by making sense of them, they sometimes attribute their unexpected resilience to external agents, such as God. 
• When people make a decision that is difficult to reverse, they are more strongly motivated to rationalize the decision and make the best of it. This is why we tend to be happier with a purchase we cannot return than with a purchase we can return if we are not happy with it. 
• People are more strongly motivated to make sense of major traumas than of minor ones, which can cause the pain of minor traumas to last longer than more serious ones. We will recover from an insult by a close friend faster than from an insult by a stranger, because we will try harder to make sense of the insult by a friend. This is counter intuitive. 
• People weigh potential losses more heavily than corresponding gains, which leads to illogical decisions. Most people refuse to gamble with a 50% of winning 5 euro and a 50% of losing 3 euro, for example. They expect that losing 3 euro will hurt more than winning 5 euro will feel good. Kermer, Driver-Linn, Wilson, and Gilbert found that this expectation of being more sad by losing money, even if it was less money, was incorrect. People were happier by winning than they had expected and less sad by losing than they had expected.