A fascinating line of research tackles the problem of affective forecasting. Such forecasting involves questions such as: How Long Will We Be Unhappy?
Affective Forecasting
This area of research studies our predictions of how we will feel when events happen. We typically aren’t very good at affective forecasting.
.. expectations are often important and often wrong. They are important because people’s actions are based, in large measure, on their implicit and explicit predictions of the emotional consequences of future events.
Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, and Wheatley 1998, page 617
This inability to predict how we will feel is both good and bad. The bad news is that this leads us to pursue things that don’t make us as happy as we think they will. We chase what isn’t really worth getting. The good news is that negative events do not always cause the awful feelings that we fear. (A welcome message given 2016’s events).
Studying Academics
A classic paper considers the problem of how long we think good and bad feelings will persist after positive and negative events. The authors argue that a key part of our inability to predict the duration of feelings is Immune Neglect. They suggest we are especially bad at predicting how long the impact of negative events will be. This is because we neglect that we have a psychological immune system. We are often better able to cope with setbacks than we imagine we will be.
How Long Will We Be Unhappy?
Gilbert and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments — being academics they saw a useful source of participants amongst their own ranks.
Assistant professors estimated how generally happy they would be at various points in time after learning that they had or had not achieved tenure. Former assistant professors who had and had not achieved tenure reported how generally happy they were. We expected that assistant professors would overestimate the duration of their negative affect after being denied tenure but that they would be relatively accurate in estimating the duration of their positive affect after achieving tenure.
Gilbert and colleagues, 1998, page 622
The results for those who got tenure are interesting too.
In short, forecasters’ estimates of their long-term reactions to a positive tenure decision were accurate…….
Gilbert and colleagues, 1998, page 624
I have just got tenure (written in 2016) so while it is only anecdotal evidence I can now see whether my estimates are as accurate as predicted by this research.
For more on future-focused decisions see here and here.
Read: Daniel T. Gilbert, Elizabeth C. Pinel, Timothy D. Wilson, Stephen J. Blumberg, and Thalia P. Wheatley (1998) Immune Neglect: A Source of Durability Bias in Affective Forecasting, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 75, No. 3, 617-638.