Comes the end of May. She would come home and remove her work clothes, shoot me a silent look telling me to not ask a single question, sit down with a stressed type of rigidity and open another random book. Going over the pages, her eyes seemed to move too fast on the pages, her look would be that of utter disconnection and vague disconnectedness. She would never read the books. I would have my own book open across from her, watching her silent twitches and the subsequent smoothing of expression and also not read. 

Strange place my old and misguided understanding of pain and togetherness had gotten us. She would comment on books I knew she hadn’t read excitedly to friends and I would do the same, only my guilt would press me to change the topic sooner. 

We received the news of her promotion in June. I ask her, barking like a hound who’s been chained too many years, if she thinks this might make her days lighter. I didn’t ask her to tell me, I asked her to give me the answer I was hoping for. 

“I don’t know,” she says. “How could I know that now?” 

“If you don’t know, why would you take it? Make the decision that… You think is right for your happiness.”

“Make the decision now… To be happy after. You’re lucky if those two things correspond for you,” disbelief and exhaustion both crackling in her tone.

Some uncomfortable silence fell.

   We are terrible at predicting how a certain future event will make us feel. We misguess how long we’ll feel terrible after a break-up. We overestimate our happiness after winning the lottery. We underestimate the complexity of feelings when we graduate. Our affective forecasting skills are lacking. 

My first reaction upon seeing this term in Malcolm Gladwell’s David & Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants was: what a fucking great term. And perhaps a little meandering image of myself as a deep-voiced affect forecaster on a news show. Maybe even showing feelings on a geographical map? 

Aaaanyways, In David & Goliath, he tells the story of the London bombings in the fall of 1940. Assuming that the coming Blitz would cause extraordinary mental harm on its residents, several new psychiatric facilities were built in the outskirts of London in anticipation of the attack. Over eight months, millions of devices were dropped on the city, killing forty thousand people and injuring even more. Millions of homes - wiped out. However, the people did not start panicking, the freshly built facilities did not fill out with people going crazy because of the fear and panic.

Instead, many experienced the opposite. Below is an excerpt from the diary of a young woman who experienced the Blitz.

 I lay there feeling indescribably happy and triumphant. “I’ve been bombed!” I kept on saying to myself, over and over again—trying the phrase on, like a new dress, to see how it fitted. “I’ve been bombed!…I’ve been bombed—me!” It seems a terrible thing to say, when many people were killed and injured last night; but never in my whole life have I ever experienced such pure and flawless happiness.

Not only are we horrible at predicting human reactions to bombing, we don’t really know how we ourselves will react to future events. We make mistakes in assessing the length of our reaction, the feeling we’ll experience and the impact it will have on our overall well-being. We simplify and cut things out, then project our current sensibilities into that future event, be it marriage or death. 

“Do you have a boyfriend?” When women were asked about their reaction to a hypothetical harassment situation and that compared to that situation being created in an experiment, the differences were vast: the women in the study assumed they would experience anger and walk out of the room or confront the harasser, but in reality, they experienced fear and, instead of refusing to answer, responded. [1] This study helps us understand that although we might hypothetically be all bold and stand up for ourselves, in reality, we might learn a coping strategy or two and set new limits to what we can take. 

 Affective forecasting or, do you assume you will be happy once you are in a relationship?

Affective forecasting or, do you fear unemployment with the intensity of a mother of 6?

Affective forecasting or, do you cringe at the thought of telling someone your truth?

 Let’s not assume how we’ll feel in the future. Less fear, less air castles, more empathy.

Affective forecasting is predicting how you will feel in the future. As it turns out, we're terrible at it. We're not good judges of what will make us happy, and we have trouble seeing through the filter of the now. Our feelings in the present blind us to how we'll make decisions in the future, when we might be feeling very differently.

As a process that influences preferences, decisions, and behavior, affective forecasting is studied by both psychologists and economists, with broad applications.

Early research tended to focus solely on measuring emotional forecasts, while subsequent studies began to examine the accuracy of forecasts, revealing that people are surprisingly poor judges of their future emotional states. 

Some of the cognitive biases related to systematic errors in affective forecasts are focalism, empathy gap, and impact bias.

While affective forecasting has traditionally drawn the most attention from economists and psychologists, their findings have in turn generated interest from a variety of other fields, including happiness research, law, and health care. Its effect on decision making and well-being is of particular concern to policy-makers and analysts in these fields, although it also has applications in ethics. For example, the tendency to underestimate our ability to adapt to life-changing events has led to legal theorists questioning the assumptions behind tort damage compensation. Behavioral economists have incorporated discrepancies between forecasts and actual emotional outcomes into their models of different types of utility and welfare. This discrepancy also concerns healthcare analysts, in that many important health decisions depend upon patients' perceptions of their future quality of life.

Affective forecasting can be divided into four components: predictions about emotional valence (i.e. positive or negative), the specific emotions experienced, their duration, and their intensity.[1] While errors may occur in all four components, research overwhelmingly indicates that the two areas most prone to bias, usually in the form of overestimation, are duration and intensity.[2][3] Immune neglect is a 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. On average, people are fairly accurate about predicting which emotions they will feel in response to future events.[1] However, some studies indicate that predicting specific emotions in response to more complex social events leads to greater inaccuracy. For example, one study found that while many women who imagine encountering gender harassment predict feelings of anger, in reality, a much higher proportion report feelings of fear.[4] Other research suggests that accuracy in affective forecasting is greater for positive affect than negative affect,[5] suggesting an overall tendency to overreact to perceived negative events. Gilbert and Wilson posit that this is a result of our psychological immune system.

While affective forecasts take place in the present moment, researchers also investigate its future outcomes.[3][6][7] That is, they analyze forecasting as a two-step process, encompassing a current prediction as well as a future event. Breaking down the present and future stages allow researchers to measure accuracy, as well as tease out how errors occur. Gilbert and Wilson, for example, categorize errors based on which component they affect and when they enter the forecasting process.[1] In the present phase of affective forecasting, forecasters bring to mind a mental representation of the future event and predict how they will respond emotionally to it. The future phase includes the initial emotional response to the onset of the event, as well as subsequent emotional outcomes, for example, the fading of the initial feeling.

When errors occur throughout the forecasting process, people are vulnerable to biases. These biases disable people from accurately predicting their future emotions. Errors may arise due to extrinsic factors, such as framing effects, or intrinsicones, such as cognitive biases or expectation effects. Because accuracy is often measured as the discrepancy between a forecaster's present prediction and the eventual outcome, researchers also study how time affects affective forecasting.

Here is #13 from the Behavioral Economics for Dogs concepts comic series. From the blog post:

Affective Forecasting: We make predictions about how events will make us feel all the time – and many of these predictions guide our life decisions. (This dog, for example, imagines how a new puppy will make him feel — and that a puppy is the wrong decision.) Yet, many of our initial predictions are inaccurate, especially when it comes to predicting the intensity and duration of our feelings.

In Part 1, I methodically approached making a decision.  I brainstormed my options and the values important to me.  I ranked things.  I assigned points to determine just how important each thing was.  I went through each option to see how well it matched each value, and I ended up with a number estimating the "best" decision.  So we have this decision-making thing locked down now, right?

Perhaps not.

When making a decision, you can gather a lot of information.  Using the example from last time, I can check what jobs are out there, and use the Bureau of Labor Statistics to see the expected growth in various fields. I can explore expected salaries, or the degree requirements for jobs I'd be interested in.  I can research degree programs to see if I'd be a good fit.  I can use travel sites to check for cheap fares.  The question, however, is are these the things I really want to know?  Yes, and no. 

While these are great bits of information to have, what I'm really trying to do when making a decision is predict how my future self will feel after having made the decision.  Will I be better off in the future?  Will I be happier?  This is called affective forecasting, and research indicates that we are not very good at it.  At all.

Not only are we not very good at it, we all seem to make the same kind of error. On the whole, people tend to overestimate the impact of a future event on their happiness.  This is what is called impact bias.  For example, when people try to predict how they will feel after a breakup, they imagine themselves upset and for a while.  Similarly, when people are asked to predict how they will feel after a positive event, like a graduation, they predict they will be quite happy and for a while.  However, in both cases, people return to about the level of happiness they had before the event, and do so much more quickly than they had predicted (for a breakup, usually about two to three months).

When making a decision, we also tend to think about what, if anything, we have already expended.  For instance, if we spend three years in a relationship, in school, or at a job, we don't want to think our time is wasted. In our decision-making process, we take into account the value of whatever time, money, and effort we have already put in, and weigh that when moving forward.  However, not only do we weigh it, it seems we tend to weigh a potential loss more heavily than a potential gain (aka "the sunk cost fallacy").  We are loss averse. We are creatures who have survived because we take calculated risks, and a potential loss can feel much more risky than a potential gain.  

Then, of course, we have this pesky thing called confirmation bias.  Let's say you believe that psychology is all a bunch of nonsense and quackery. The likelihood is that you will remember and retain information that supports this belief while ignoring information that does not.   

So if we cannot accurately predict how we'll feel in the future, we are more averse to losses than to gains, and we seem to seek out or retain information that confirms what we already believe, how can we make a good decision?

Stay tuned for Part 3!

************

You can see the future – what do you do? I would use my super-power once for evil: to win at Wall Street, obviously. And then only for harmless happy-boosting purposes, promise. Just imagine– no more food envy, no more Christmas-shopping stress, no more uncertainty-related angst of any description. You would be able to predict how happy any outcome would make you and others. Unfortunately though, most of us do not possess super-psychic powers and have to rely on our normal human brains for this and every task. How very vanilla.

‘Affective forecasting’ is what psychologists call it when we try to predict how a future event will impact our emotional well-being. For example, if I passed this exam, how happy would I be? If my boyfriend broke up with me, how unhappy would I become? How long would this unhappiness last?

The funny thing is, we’re really really bad at it.