Affective Forecasting Flashcards
(17 cards)
Four components to affective forecasting
- Predictions about the VALENCE of one’s feelings
- Specific emotions experienced
- Intensity of the emotions
- Duration of emotions
What is affective forecasting?
Anticipation of feelings towards an event
Measuring predicted and experienced emotional responses and seeing how accurate your predictions are with how you actually feel
Research by Wilson & Gilbert, examining accuracy of forecasts and revealing that people are surprisingly poor judges of their future emotional states
Predicting valence summary
People’s forecasts may be more realistic for events that will happen SOON
Affected by temporal valence
Overly simplistic for events far in the future
Valence: Wilson et al (2002)
They staged a dating game in which students competed with a same-sex student for a hypothetical date with an opposite-sex student. Randomly assigned to win or lose the date, after which they rated their mood. Forecasters estimated what their mood would be if they won or lost the date. All forecasters that they would be in a better mood if they won than lost (mirroring judgements of the experiencers). However forecasters OVERESTIMATED how positive or negative they would feel.
Temporal valence - how does this affect accuracy of forecasting?
Gilbert et al (2002) - supermarket and spaghetti
WHEN exactly an event will take place will shape their reactions
Liberman et al (2002) noted that people have overly simplistic reactions to emotional events when thinking about the distant (compared to the near) future
good day tomorrow (positive events with a few negative occurrences)
good day in a year (people only report positive events)
Predicting intensity and duration
People have overestimate duration of future emotional reactions (Gilbert et al, 1998)
Your favourite team winning an important match
Most prone to bias - usually OVERESTIMATION
Immune neglect
Form of impact bias in response to negative events, in which people fail to predict how much their psychological immune system will hasten their recovery
OVERREACT to perceived negative events
Factors causing forecasting errors
Framing effects (extrinsic) Cognitive biases Expectation effects (intrinsic)
Construal level theory
Tendency for people to represent distant events differently from close events
Impact bias
Tendency to overestimate EMOTIONAL impact of a future event in terms of intensity or duration
Impact bias - lottery study
Examined college students participating in a housing lottery
These students predicted how happy or unhappy they would be one year after being assigned to either a desirable or an undesirable dormitory
These college students predicted that the lottery outcomes would lead to meaningful differences in their own level of happiness, but follow-up questionnaires revealed that students assigned to desirable or undesirable dormitories reported nearly the same levels of happiness.
Thus, differences in forecasts overestimated the impact of the housing assignment on future happiness
Durability bias
The tendency to overestimate the length of time future emotional responses will last - even if people accurately estimate intensity of their future emotions, they may not be able to estimate the duration of them
Also generally stronger in reaction to negative events
Expectation effects
Self-fulfilling prophecy - Previously formed expectations can alter emotional responses to the event itself, motivating forecasters to confirm or debunk their initial forecasts
a forecaster who expects a movie to be enjoyable will, upon finding it dull, like it significantly less than a forecaster who had no expectations
Immune neglect
Gilbert et al (1998)
People are generally unaware of the operation of the system of cognitive mechanisms that ameliorate their experience of negative affect (the psychological immune system), and thus they tend to overestimate the duration of their affective reactions to negative events. This tendency was demonstrated in 6 studies in which participants overestimated the duration of their affective reactions to the dissolution of a romantic relationship, the failure to achieve tenure, an electoral defeat, negative personality feedback, an account of a child’s death, and rejection by a prospective employer. Participants failed to distinguish between situations in which their psychological immune systems would and would not be likely to operate and mistakenly predicted overly and equally enduring affective reactions in both instances. The present experiments suggest that people neglect the psychological immune system when making affective forecasts
Coping strategies are not considered when people predict future events
Immune neglect (Hoerger et al., 2009)
Examined college students’ emotions for football games
Those that coped with their emotions instead of avoiding them recovered more quickly and thus had a greater impact bias when predicting how they would feel if their team lost the game
Those who avoided their emotions, felt very closely to their predicted emotions
Positive vs negative affect (influence on valence)
Research suggests accuracy of affective forecasting for positive and negative emotions is based on the distance in time of the forecast
Temporal bias
Errors in cognition
- Focalism - focus too much on certain details of an event
- Time discounting/preference to weigh present events over future events - prefer immediate over delayed gratification
- Memory - DECAY BIAS - mind constructs memories based on knowledge, experiences and existing schemas
- often use most available past memories - not always most representative –> IMPACT BIAS
or misremember past predictions - Misconstruals - framing effects
