Affective Forecasting

When deciding whether to order a pizza or a cheeseburger, to live in California or Winnipeg, or to make the big leap to have children, people may spontaneously envision the emotions that each possible future would evoke. The capacity to make such affective forecasts stems from humans' exceptional ability to step back from their present experience and mentally travel through time to re-live or “pre-live” personal events. However, our emotional projections can often be biased. This entry introduces the notion [Page 12]of forecasting errors and the two main reasons behind them.

Affective forecasts have been shown to predict a variety of decisions, from whether to comply with a persuasion attempt to whether to get a flu shot. These decisions may be flawed, however, given that a large body of evidence shows that individuals often stumble in predicting their affective reactions to future events. People frequently overestimate how happy they will be after positive events, such as getting promoted, and how sad they will feel after negative events, such as the loss of a favorite sports team or political candidate. This tendency to overestimate the intensity and duration of emotional responses (termed the impact bias) is perhaps the most commonly observed forecasting error. Yet, there are also important cases in which people underestimate their emotional responses to events. For example, individuals in committed romantic relationships have been shown to underestimate the pleasure they would derive from interacting with a stranger of the opposite sex. Finally, in some cases, people may even mispredict whether the emotional consequences of an event will be positive or negative; as one example, most people expect that they would feel better if they had the opportunity to punish a free rider, even when exacting revenge accentuates distress.

Although forecasting errors can assume a wide variety of forms, most of these errors stem from the failure to fully appreciate two fundamental principles of emotion. First, emotions are transient; although a given event may provoke a strong emotional response at first, even powerful emotions are likely to fade away quickly under most circumstances. Some of the most common forecasting errors spring from the failure to appreciate the power and dynamics of such hedonic adaptation. Second, context matters; both the emotions we experience and those we imagine depend on the context in which the experiencing and the imagining occur. Overlooking the importance of context can unleash a host of forecasting errors—particularly when emotions are imagined and experienced in very different contexts.