Person:

Gilbert, Daniel

The hedonic value of an outcome can be influenced by the alternatives to which it is compared, which is why people expect to be happier with outcomes that maximize comparative value (e.g., the best of several mediocre alternatives) than with outcomes that maximize absolute value (e.g., the worst of several excellent alternatives). The results of five experiments suggest that affective forecasters overestimate the importance of comparative value because forecasters do not realize that comparison requires cognitive resources, and that experiences consume more cognitive resources than do forecasts. In other words, because forecasters overestimate the extent to which they will be able to think about what they did not get while experiencing what they got.

We developed a smartphone technology to sample people’s ongoing thoughts, feelings, and actions and found (i) that people are thinking about what is not happening almost as often as they are thinking about what is and (ii) found that doing so typically makes them unhappy.

People often make shortsighted decisions to receive small benefits in the present rather than large benefits in the future, that is, to favor their current selves over their future selves. In two studies using fMRI, we demonstrated that people make such decisions in part because they fail to engage in the same degree of self-referential processing when thinking about their future selves. When participants predicted how much they would enjoy an event in the future, they showed less activity in brain regions associated with introspective self-reference—such as the ventromedial pFC (vMPFC)—than when they predicted how much they would enjoy events in the present. Moreover, the magnitude of vMPFC reduction predicted the extent to which participants made shortsighted monetary decisions several weeks later. In light of recent findings that the vMPFC contributes to the ability to simulate future events from a first-person perspective, these data suggest that shortsighted decisions result in part from a failure to fully imagine the subjective experience of one's future self.

Salience and satisfaction are important factors in determining the comparisons that people make. We hypothesized that people make salient comparisons first, and then make satisfying comparisons only if salient comparisons leave them unsatisfied. This hypothesis suggests an asymmetry between winning and losing. For winners, comparison with a salient alternative (i.e., losing) brings satisfaction. Therefore, winners should be sensitive only to the relative value of their outcomes. For losers, comparison with a salient alternative (i.e., winning) brings little satisfaction. Therefore, losers should be drawn to compare outcomes with additional standards, which should make them sensitive to both relative and absolute values of their outcomes. In Experiment 1, participants won one of two cash prizes on a scratch-off ticket. Winners were sensitive to the relative value of their prizes, whereas losers were sensitive to both the relative and the absolute values of their prizes. In Experiment 2, losers were sensitive to the absolute value of their prize only when they had sufficient cognitive resources to engage in effortful comparison.

Uncertainty has been defined as a lack of information about an event and has been characterized as an aversive state that people are motivated to reduce. The authors propose an uncertainty intensification hypothesis, whereby uncertainty during an emotional event makes unpleasant events more unpleasant and pleasant events more pleasant. The authors hypothesized that this would happen even when uncertainty is limited to the feeling of "not knowing," separable from a lack of information. In 4 studies, the authors held information about positive and negative film clips constant while varying the feeling of not knowing by having people repeat phrases connoting certainty or uncertainty while watching the films. As predicted, the subjective feeling of uncertainty intensified people's affective reactions to the film clips.

In many choices they make—-for example, choosing between a movie and a play or deciding whether to attend a sports game shortly before a birthday party—-consumers are guided by how they expect an event will make them feel. They may predict their feelings by forecasting (imagining their feelings when the impacting event occurs, then considering how those feelings might change over time) or by backcasting (imagining their feelings in a future period, then considering how those feelings might be different were the impacting event to happen). Four studies show that backcasters expect events to have a greater hedonic impact than do forecasters, largely because they think more about the impacting event. The studies also reveal that backcasters consider other information that forecasters tend to ignore.

Two experiments revealed that (i) people can more accurately predict their affective reactions to a future event when they know how a neighbor in their social network reacted to the event than when they know about the event itself and (ii) people do not believe this. Undergraduates made more accurate predictions about their affective reactions to a 5-minute speed date (n = 25) and to a peer evaluation (n = 88) when they knew only how another undergraduate had reacted to these events than when they had information about the events themselves. Both participants and independent judges mistakenly believed that predictions based on information about the event would be more accurate than predictions based on information about how another person had reacted to it.

People typically choose pleasure over pain. But how do they know which of these their choices will entail? The brain generates mental simulations (previews) of future events, which produce affective reactions (premotions), which are then used as a basis for forecasts (predictions) about the future event's emotional consequences. Research shows that this process leads to systematic errors of prediction. We review evidence indicating that these errors can be traced to five sources.