Affective Forecasting

The Wilson and Gilbert Article illustrates the idea of affective forecasting which is the theory that humans tend to over or underestimate emotions of a future event.

One of the first examples of this in the article was the concept of the impact bias which states how much we tend to overestimate the intensity and duration of our emotions in reaction to an event in the future. The article uses a couple of examples to illustrate this with showing how professors overestimated how unhappy they'd be 5 years after not receiving tenure, and women overestimated how unhappy they'd be in receiving unwanted pregnancy results.
To explain the impact bias Wilson and Gilbert use two terms. The first being focalism which is the tendency to overestimate how much we'll think about a particular event and underestimate how much other events will impact us at the time. An example of this can be winning $100 on the lottery and then realizing there are still $500 worth of bills to be paid.
Another influence on the impact bias was the concept of how much humans don't take into account how quickly something unexpected will be rationalized in our minds and lead to a less emotional impact. To help explain this Gilbert and Wilson give the theory that people don't realize how quickly they can rationalize something so unexpected and how this decreases the level of reaction to the event that they predicted. For example unexpectedly finding $20 on the street and being able to attribute it to someone who had dropped it would be more gratifying then finding $20 in a preschool classroom that you had no idea of where it came from.

The article also goes into negative forecasting and the concept of immune neglect which explains how people unconsciously rationalize a negative situation in their mind and therefore are more likely to cope with it in the future. The example given in the article is the idea that people who found it easier to rationalize why they didn't get a job (having a single interviewer as oppose to a group of interviewers) they tended to have a less strong reaction than people who couldn't seem to rationalize why they didn't receive the job. Gilbert and Wilson use immune neglect to explain why people are more likely to have a better reaction to something that they are able to rationalize in their mind.

A great example of affective forecasting in the real world would be the overestimation of how unhappy/happy people would be when president Obama was elected into office. At the time of his election the approval ratings for Obama were pretty high and since 2008, they've decreased quite a bit. Why? Because people tended to use the concept of focalism. They overestimate how happy/unhappy they'd be with the election results. For example How happy they'd be that an African American or Democrat president was elected may have led to the overestimation but the impact of health care reform may have greatly impacted their life leading to the decrease of happiness in their previously elated prediction.

Another simpler way of looking at this is the estimation of college students on how happy they'll be with a job that is in their degree field as oppose to not in their degree field after graduation. People that are easily able to rationalize their job (psychology student, psychologist) as oppose to people who aren't able to rationalize their job (history student, business worker). According to Gilbert and Wilson the one able to rationalize their job is happier, but is that really true? This could determine how much external factors really play a role. Perhaps further research?


Discussion Questions:

In class we talked about Emotion Regulation. We talked about the idea of inhibition and enhancing your emotions in order to make it easier to accept. How much does this idea of regulating our emotions impact our affective forecasting? Are they correlated at all or does it have little or no impact on how we estimate our future emotions?

In the article there was no mention of how this affects different genders or ethnicities. For example does socioeconomic status effect the way that we predict our future events? Do people really reach for the stars or do they reach as high as they feel they can go? Is this dependent on external factors such as sex and ethnicity?

-Jessica Lopez (jal3347)