Affective forecasting

Really fascinating stuff in this conversation with Harvard psychology professor Daniel Gilbert. Gilbert is most known for his work on ”affective forecasting,” or the uniquely human ability to predict the pleasure or pain of future experiences, and to make choices based on those predictions. Says Gilbert:

We are the only animals that can peer deeply into our futures — the only animal that can travel mentally through time, preview a variety of futures, and choose the one that will bring us the greatest pleasure and/or the least pain. This is a remarkable adaptation — which, incidentally, is directly tied to the evolution of the frontal lobe — because it means that we can learn from mistakes before we make them. We don’t have to actually have gallbladder surgery or lounge around on a Caribbean beach to know that one of these is better than another.

His research focuses on such predictions — which define so many human choices in daily, monthly, or the entirety of life — and the systematic errors we make in the process. He continues:

We may do this better than any other animal, but our research suggests that we don’t do it perfectly. Our ability to simulate the future and to forecast our hedonic reactions to it is seriously flawed, and that people are rarely as happy or unhappy as they expect to be.

Gilbert spends quite a bit of time on projections of negative experiences (loss, criticism, and such), but he also explores how people predict their emotional reactions to positive events. In both cases, the human mind tends to predict more happiness or unhappiness than actually materializes. And we don’t tend to learn over time to temper these predictions, despite repeated experience. Part of the reason, Gilbert says, is that we are unaware of our own coping mechanisms that soften the blow of unpleasant experiences — rationalization, justification, etc. Another part of the reason is that when predicting our reaction to a future experience, we tend to isolate that experience in our mind, rather than seeing it in context. Says he:

When we’re trying to predict how happy we will be in a future that contains Event X, we tend to focus on Event X and forget about all the other events that also populate that future — events that tend to dilute the hedonic impact of Event X. In a sense, we are slaves to the focus of our own attention. For example, in one study we asked college students to predict how happy or unhappy they would be a few days after their home team won or lost a football game, and they expected the game to have a large impact on their hedonic state. But when we simply asked them to name a dozen other things that would happen in those days before they made their predictions, the game had far less impact on their predictions. In other words, once they thought about how well-populated the future was, they realized that the game was just one of many sources of happiness and that its impact would be diluted by others.

Now, if the theory and study of ”affective forecasting” isn’t immediately relevant to you as an arts marketer, manager, or development officer, I’m clearly not doing my job as a blogger. Go read.