I would like to highlight the concept of our failures in ‘affective forecasting’.
“We are often poor at predicting our happiness. Most relevant to the issue of stability, we tend to think life events matter more than they will. We fail to appreciate that we are fairly resilient to bad experiences and, unfortunately, fairly unaffected by good ones as well.”
“In another study, sports fans were asked how they would feel after a pivotal soccer championship game. It was made clear to them that they were being asked about their overall feelings, not their feelings when they were thinking about the game, but still, fans of the winning team overestimated how happy they would be, and fans of the losing team overestimated how sad they would be. After the 2000 election, when George Bush was elected president, Bush supporters were not as happy as they thought they would be, and Gore supporters were not as unhappy as they thought they would be. Indeed, even for more severe events, such as the dissolution of a romantic relationship, people tend to overestimate how much their happiness will be affected.
Why are we so poor at predicting our future happiness? One consideration is that when you make the prediction, you think about the event, and this act of thinking leads one to overestimate how much you'll think about it in the future. When I'm asked to imagine my favorite candidate losing the election, I feel crushed, and when making predictions about how I'll feel after the election, I might say that I'll be crushed, failing to appreciate that most of the time I won't be thinking about politics at all.”
“Thinking about winning a large prize makes me flush with excitement, and so I predict this will make me happy in the future, not realizing that for the vast proportion of my future life my mind will be elsewhere. As Daniel Kahneman and Richard Thaler put it, nothing in life matters quite as much as you think it does when you are thinking of it.”
Finally, he recommends two attitudes towards the field of psychology :
“The first attitude is humility. There are some basic questions that nobody knows the answer to yet. We know that the brain is the source of mental life, but we don't know how a physical object, a lump of meat, can give rise to conscious experience. We know that much of the variation in personality, intelligence, happiness, and other psychological traits is heritable, but we don't know how genes have their effects and have little understanding of the role of life experiences in shaping how we are. We know about the power of social influence, but we are far from being able to predict and control what people do. We have some understanding of mental illness, but our diagnoses and treatments are, to put it bluntly, primitive. For every topic of psychology, genuine puzzles remain.
The second attitude is optimism. I believe that the methods of scientific psychology will eventually triumph. In the end, the most important and intimate aspects of ourselves, our beliefs and emotions, the capacity to make decisions, our sense of right and wrong, even our conscious experience, will be explained through constructing and testing scientific hypotheses. We've made progress; we will make much more.”
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