Affective Forecasting

What Do Humans Forecast Accurately?

[Page 71]By 3 to 4 years of age, children can pair basic emotions with prototypical situations, enabling them to predict which events elicit positive as opposed to negative reactions. For example, young children can easily anticipate that eating ice cream will feel better than dropping it on the ground.

Between the ages of 5 and 8, children become better able to distinguish between different kinds of negative (e.g., anger versus sadness) and positive (e.g., happiness versus pride) emotions, they recognize the potential for experiencing mixed emotions, and they increasingly understand that personal characteristics (e.g., an individual’s past experiences or personality traits) and mental states (e.g., beliefs, thoughts) influence how people feel. These initial advances in affective forecasting help children understand their own and others’ emotional lives, facilitate empathy and healthy social relationships, and shape decisions to approach or avoid certain people or situations.

What Do Humans Forecast Inaccurately?

Despite advances in causal reasoning about emotions, researchers have identified several errors in emotion forecasting that persist throughout the lifespan. The impact bias, or the tendency to anticipate that an event will carry more weight than it actually does, arises from children’s and adults’ difficulty in determining the intensity and duration of their emotions.

For instance, people expect that winning the lottery will lead to an immensely positive and long-lasting emotional response. In reality, winning the lottery feels good at first, but the feeling quickly dissipates once additional negative factors of the experience sink in (e.g., uncertainty about whether others want to be friends just because of one’s increased wealth). Notably, impact bias occurs for both positive (e.g., winning the lottery) and negative (e.g., divorce) events, but the bias may be especially strong for negative outcomes.

Children and adults err not only when predicting their future emotional states but also when anticipating their physiological states (e.g., How cold will I be later today?), preferences (e.g., Will I still hate mayonnaise 10 years from now?), and desires (e.g., Will I still want that kind of pet in a month?). For example, a study with 3- to 7-year-olds by Cristina Atance and Andrew Meltzoff demonstrated that children who are made thirsty by consuming pretzels predict they will want water the following day, presumably because they want water in the present. Thus, young children give too much weight to their current states when forecasting their future ones.

This may seem like an error that would be confined to early childhood, but analogous mistakes are documented in adulthood. For instance, hungry grocery shoppers often buy items they will never eat because they want them in that moment, and satiated shoppers have a difficult time recognizing that hunger will strike again. Predicting how preferences will change with time is also problematic.

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