Mind: Your Future Happiness Depends Less on the Present than You Might Think

You make a lot of decisions based on how you think they will make you feel in the future. Car dealers ask you to think about how happy you'll be driving a beautiful new car. Ads for seafaring cruises ask you to think about how great you'll feel after a relaxing vacation. On the flip side, people work hard for a new promotion believing that if they don't advance in their career, they will be devastated.

The evidence is pretty clear, though, that big positive and negative events don't have an enormous impact on people's happiness. In a 1998 paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dan Gilbert, Tim Wilson, and their colleagues found that college faculty being evaluated for tenure believed they would be quite unhappy if they were denied tenure. Several months after their tenure decision, though, college faculty who had been denied tenure were no less happy than those who had gotten tenure.

... people have difficulty remembering their initial prediction for how they would feel after a positive or negative event. In one study, they asked voters in the 2008 election how they would feel a week after the election if Barack Obama won. Supporters of John McCain rated that they would be quite unhappy. A week after the election, these same voters were contacted again and asked how happy they were. They were also asked to recall how happy they said they would be before the election. These voters were significantly happier than they predicted they would be (that is the affective forecasting error). They also remembered their prediction as being less extreme than it was. That is, they did not remember predicting that they would be very unhappy.

The researchers demonstrated that this poor memory for previous predictions makes it hard for people to learn to predict better in the future.

Do these affective forecasting errors really matter? In fact, these errors may be both a blessing and a curse.

On the positive side, it can be motivating to be very concerned about a future event. College faculty approaching tenure are often quite productive in the years before their evaluation, because they believe that the outcome of this decision will hugely influence their career. Even though the actual tenure decision won't influence their future happiness much, this hard work may still lay important groundwork for their research in years to come.

On the negative side, though, these affective forecasting errors can also lead to bad decisions. If you really believe that a sports car will make you happier, you may overpay to own it. That means that you will spend a lot of money on a purchase that ultimately won't affect your happiness that much.

For more, see Your Future Happiness Depends Less on the Present than You Might Think by Art Markman, November 12, 2010 at Psychology Today.