How well can we predict our feelings?

Hi, I’m Dr. Laurie Santos, professor of psychology and cognitive science at Yale University, and in this video I’ll discuss research challenging our assumption that we can trust our intuitive guesses about how happy we’d feel in imagined circumstances. Because often, we can’t. Like most of us, Maya works hard to improve her circumstances, believing that this is the path to happiness. So when Maya sees research showing that materially successful people aren’t much happier than people who have less, she takes it with a grain of salt. Maybe most people don’t get boosts in happiness when they get great things, but she doubts that applies to her. After all, when Maya fantasizes about getting the lucrative job or the true love she’s been seeking, she has a strong intuition that this would make her so much happier. Maya recognizes that intuitions, while often good guides, can sometimes be quite misleading. But shouldn’t we be able to trust our intuitions about something as basic as how we’d feel if all our hopes and dreams came true? The process of guessing how we’d feel in the future of what our affects would be if some particular situation came to pass is what psychologists call “affective forecasting". And research shows that these intuitive predictions often significantly miss the mark. When we try to predict how a particular event will impact our feelings, we’re susceptible to what’s called an “impact bias". Take one study, for example. Assistant college professors were asked to predict how happy they’d feel after finding out the result of their tenure promotion: whether they’d been accepted or rejected to the position of full professor. These forecasters’ predictions were then compared to the actual happiness of people who’d already been through the tenure process. Forecasters predicted that they’d be really happy if they got tenure. But, though people who’d gotten tenure were generally happy, they were significantly less happy than the forecasters had predicted. Forecasters were even more mistaken about the impact of being rejected for tenure. They predicted that happiness would drop dramatically after this decision. But people who were actually rejected for tenure? They reported happiness levels just slightly below the levels of people who got tenure. Many similar studies support the existence of this bias: Fans of college football teams overestimated how happy they’d be in the days after their team won a game and how unhappy they’d be in the days after their team lost. Voters in a U.S. presidential election overestimated how significantly the election outcome would impact their happiness. And people getting an HIV test? Overestimated how much their test results would affect their happiness. And, just as in that tenure study, the impact bias was always stronger when people were trying to predict how they’d feel if things went badly. Researchers have identified a number of psychological mechanisms that make us susceptible to impact bias in our affective forecasts. One of the most important of these mechanisms is called “focalism". When we imagine how we’d feel after going through a particular event, we have a natural tendency to focus almost exclusively on that event, ignoring everything else that might be going on but might also be impacting how we feel. Another psychological mechanism is called “immune neglect". Immune neglect is especially interesting because it helps explain why our impact bias is so pronounced for negative events. Immune neglect describes our tendency to ignore the way our minds pick us up emotionally after losses and failures. We overestimate how unhappy we’ll feel after some bad event because we neglect the way our psychological “immune systems” give us resilience during emotional downturns. In one study, college students predicted that they would be really unhappy if they didn’t get chosen for a quick and easy job. But they neglected to realize that they’d probably think the selection process was unfair if they didn’t get the role. Our minds use lots of tricks for rebound from bad stuff. And one of those tricks is to blame all our failures on external factors. So, when subjects had an easy explanation for not being chosen for the job “that process was so unfair!” it was much easier for their psychological immune systems to kick in. But subjects neglected to take their immune system into account in their affective forecasting. And since immune neglect only comes into play when dealing with negative events, our affective forecasts tend to be worse for the bad events in life than the positive ones. Seeing this research has made Maya more skeptical about her affective forecasts. The evidence about immune neglect was especially eye-opening for her. Maya now wonders how often she’s shied away from worthwhile opportunities just because she overestimated how upset she’d be if things didn’t work out. She also wonders, though, why seemingly obvious life improvements like earning a higher salary don’t end up boosting our happiness very much. What’s going on? Is it that we get used to those better circumstances and start taking them for granted? What do you think?