The article here reveals that people base many decisions in life by predictions about their emotional reactions to future events called affective forecasting. One psychological phenomenon dealing with affective forecasting if the impact bias, where people overestimate the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to future events, event though they know what the event will be life and they are not in a particularly emotional state at the time of making their forecast.
An example of the impact bias is shown through college students and how they overestimated how happy or unhappy they would be after being assigned to a desirable or undesirable dorm. The students who predicted that they would be happy in a desirable dorm were actually less happy about it as they moved it. The students who predicted that they would not be happy in an undesirable dorm were actually more happy they thought they would be when they actually moved in.
How would the impact bias affect shoppers? How would on view the impact bias as a beneficial aspect?
Wei Tian
One thing I found particularly interesting about this article was the concept of immune neglect, and how major negative events or irreversible decisions are more likely to be rationalized non consciously, and become more acceptable to the person involved.
ReplyDeleteDo you think that consciously aiming to make more irrevocable decisions is more like to increase positive affect in the long term?
Do you think that the process of rationalization as a whole (for both positive and negative events) is a good or bad thing? i.e. if you could choose to experience all emotions more strongly, would you?
I think that rationalization can be both a good and bad thing, because when you are rationalizing a situation you are trying to make sense of it therefore cutting the duration of the feeling of the emotion you are having, but bad because sometimes we tend to diffuse responsibility.
ReplyDeleteA concept that I found interesting was focalism, which is to overestimate how much we will think about the event in the future and to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts and feelings.
Why is it that when we think of events happening in the future we don’t tend to focus on external stimuli outside of the situation? Would we be more accurate in forecasting our emotions and feelings if we thought about other things that might occur?
Creshun,
ReplyDeleteThat's a great point you make. I think there can be some truth to being more able to accurately forecasting our emotions and feelings if we were to consider external stimuli outside of the event that we were focusing on. That's a bit of a mouth full, but I think you get it.
Example: When I moved to Austin, I thought life would be so much easier being away from the stress of family expectations. But I didn't think about the possibility that I knew absolutely no one in Austin and how that would effect me. Perhaps if I had prepared myself to that possible thought, I would have had a more accurate forecast of my emotional experience here in Austin.
But because life is so unpredictable sometimes, I don't think its fair to ever really fully give an accurate forecast of our emotions. What would be the pros and cons of successfully predicting/ forecasting your own emotions? And what would be the pros and cons of failing to predict/ forecast your own emotions? Here's another thought, what about the pros and cons of forecasting another person's emotions?
A. Diamond Torres
I think everyone has made great points thus far. I think affective forecasting is a reflection on people's expectations that they have personally for themselves,others and events in life. It seems that in the college dorm examples it had a lot to do with what the students were perceiving the outcome to be. It seems counterintuitive that having low expectations Iwould be ideal but it also seems that those students with the lower expectations had a better out outcome. As far as for shoppers it would seem that people would be more satisfied with what they buy if they don't have extremely high expectations. People that expect a product to be perfect and amazing might be dissapointed with what they get. I think affective forecasting is a good thing but maybe further research could look at motivation level and prior expectations.
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