EmotionalDUAL-USE

Affective Forecasting Errors

What it is

People mispredict how future events will make them feel — overestimating the intensity and duration of both joys and sorrows, and focusing on whatever is in view — and persuaders sell to the forecast rather than to the experience.

How it works

Gilbert, Wilson and colleagues documented the impact bias in the late 1990s: assistant professors predicted that tenure decisions would transform their happiness for years; those who had lived through them were near baseline within months. The causes are several. Immune neglect: people forget that they rationalize, reframe, and adapt. Focalism: the forecast fixes on the event and ignores everything else that will fill the days. The focusing illusion, in Schkade and Kahneman's phrase: nothing in life is as important as you think it is while you are thinking about it. Brickman's 1978 comparison of lottery winners and accident victims first suggested the resilience that forecasts miss. The impact bias is among the better-replicated findings in the field, though Levine and colleagues argue that part of it is an artefact of how forecasting questions are asked. The lever is that decisions are made on forecasts. Marketers sell the imagined first day of ownership; extended-warranty pitches sell the imagined regret; lottery advertising sells the imagined life; political messaging sells the imagined catastrophe or golden age after the vote. Because the forecast is more intense than the experience will be, the product or policy is systematically overvalued at the moment of choice.

Real-world examples

  • •Gilbert et al. (1998): assistant professors forecast that being denied tenure would leave them unhappy for years; former assistant professors who had been denied were about as happy as those who had been granted it.
  • •Gilbert et al. (1998) also asked voters before the 1994 Texas gubernatorial election how they would feel a month after their candidate lost; the losers' actual mood a month later was far less affected than they had predicted.
  • •Schkade and Kahneman (1998): students in the Midwest and in California both predicted that Californians would be happier because of the climate; actual life satisfaction did not differ, because climate is not what people spend their days attending to.
  • •Extended warranties and “protection plans” are sold on the imagined regret of a breakage; consumer advocates such as Consumer Reports have long advised that most are poor value against the actual failure rates.
  • •Lottery advertising shows the imagined life after a win; Brickman, Coates and Janoff-Bulman (1978) found that winners were not markedly happier than controls and took less pleasure in everyday events.

Ethical guidelines

Where the line is

Describing how a product or policy will feel is legitimate when the description matches ordinary experience and the customer is free to adjust their forecast; it becomes manipulation when the pitch deliberately inflates the imagined peak — of joy, regret, or catastrophe — because the seller knows the forecast is what will be paid for and the experience will never be checked against it.

  • ●Sell the experience, not the forecast: describe what ownership or the policy is like on an ordinary day, not on the imagined first day.
  • ●Do not manufacture anticipated regret to sell insurance, warranties, or add-ons; quote the failure rate and let the customer decide.
  • ●In political communication, forecasts of disaster or deliverance should be tied to specific, checkable outcomes, not to the emotional peak of the imagined result.
  • ●Using forecasting research to help people choose well — reminding them that they will adapt — is a legitimate use of the same knowledge.

How to defend against it

  • ►Ask a surrogate. Gilbert and colleagues found that people predict their feelings better by asking someone currently living the outcome than by imagining it; find that person.
  • ►Defocus on purpose: before a big purchase or decision, list what an ordinary Tuesday will actually contain a year from now. The item or outcome will occupy a small part of it.
  • ►For anticipated-regret pitches, ask for the base rate: how often does this thing break, and what does the repair cost without the plan?
  • ►Discount your own intensity forecast, in both directions, by remembering the last thing you were sure would change everything.
  • ►Use the 24-hour rule on any decision made at the peak of anticipation; the forecast decays faster than the contract does.

From the Defense Playbook

Know Your Vulnerability Windowstakes practice

Identify in advance the states and life periods in which you are easiest to persuade (exhaustion, grief, loneliness, money trouble, a move, a breakup, a new job) and set standing rules that apply automatically when you are in one.

Every playbook entry states how strong its evidence is and when not to use it. Browse the full playbook.

References

  1. 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 · link
    The tenure and election studies, and the immune-neglect account of durability bias.
  2. Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2003). Affective forecasting. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 35, 345-411
    The review of impact bias, focalism, and immune neglect.
  3. Schkade, D. A., & Kahneman, D. (1998). Does living in California make people happy? A focusing illusion in judgments of life satisfaction. Psychological Science, 9(5), 340-346
    The focusing illusion: predicted but not actual differences in satisfaction across regions.
  4. Brickman, P., Coates, D., & Janoff-Bulman, R. (1978). Lottery winners and accident victims: Is happiness relative?. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36(8), 917-927
    Early evidence of adaptation to major positive and negative life events.
  5. Gilbert, D. T., Killingsworth, M. A., Eyre, R. N., & Wilson, T. D. (2009). The surprising power of neighborly advice. Science, 323(5921), 1617-1619
    Surrogate reports from people living an outcome predicted feelings better than imagining it.
  6. Levine, L. J., Lench, H. C., Kaplan, R. L., & Safer, M. A. (2012). Accuracy and artifact: Reexamining the intensity bias in affective forecasting. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(4), 584-605
    The argument that part of the measured intensity bias is a question-wording artefact.
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