affective (emotional) forecasting

August 12, 2018

How Much Do You Think About Your Future?

“What dreams may come?” wondered Hamlet as he considered whether “to be, or not to be.” The potential of an afterlife of nightmares stopped him short of self-murder. For the rest of us, the time beyond today is either ignored, dreaded, colored in unending rainbows; or maybe even calmly planned.

Experience suggests that whatever comes will include both good and bad; and depend, in part, on how we approach it.

One’s individual weather forecast depends, to a degree, on his history and inborn, genetic disposition. Yes, there are born optimists or born pessimists. Guess who has more fun?

Cognitive behavior therapists help the latter group’s struggle with catastrophization. The counselor trains his patient to recognize the error within the terror of anticipated disaster when little realistic likelihood exists. The worst of life is best encountered in the moment. Don’t pour worry over yourself, like a sticky syrup mucking-up every day. “Borrowing trouble” comes at much expense, killing our ambitions before they begin.

When we do think past the horizon, some of us mistakenly focus on only half of what must be done to raise our prospects. It is not enough to quit an awful marriage or job, despite the immediate relief of departure. What comes after? Ask how you deposited yourself in a swamp? Envision a destination and a plan of attack. None of this is easy.

I know people who need a permanent set of attached binoculars to check out next steps. Some take bodily risks. Think prodigious drinking, eating, or drugging. Nor do I speak of the ones who simply deny their self-abuse. Too many possess the “talent” (or curse) of shutting off their brains when offered a drink or walking into a restaurant: an unconscious, dissociative process like a selective amnesia. A hour earlier they intended to pass by the cocktail or the quarter-pounder with cheese. Faced with the devilish dilemma, the brain takes a vacation — temporarily closes-off a sliver of awareness. One might think of it as the sky on a clear day, but for one cloudy portion.

The future is a trickster. His opening act makes us believe we own an unused bank vault full of years. For those who do survive, unlived time is most often neither so wonderful or terrible as we imagine. Humans hedonically adapt. After a period of euphoria we tend to move back to our “set point:” our usual level of emotional equanimity or distress. Time’s passage also elevates our spirits from the first awfulness of many seeming disasters. Review your history. You might find lots of misfortune from which you bounced back.

Truth is, we are poor affective forecasters — weak at predicting the emotional residue of our adventures. Psychologists Daniel Gilbert and Tim Wilson tells us this leads to “miswanting.” We guess we will like some choices more than we do when they happen, in addition to “mispredicting” how long strong feelings will last afterward.

You think a $10,000 raise offers sustained joy? Most likely not for long. Simply put, after a year or two, most of us feel about the same as we did before the wonderful or terrible thing happened.

If you dislike the fallible weatherman, examine your prognostic success. In 10-years-time you could be surprised by how much you change and how those alterations complicate your ability to make predictions about what you will enjoy:

While I’m giving crystal ball warnings, beware of “bucket lists.” Other than people like my old buddy Ron Ableman, I knew many who kicked the bucket before they reached the list inside. Another group believed their long-awaited trip to Paris, for example, would have held more enchantment in the springtime of their life.

If you peg your well-being to winning an Olympic gold metal or some similar recognition, reconsider. Someone will win the distinction, but far more won’t. The impossible dream is the graveyard of life satisfaction. Instead, enjoy the process and more probable rewards along the way. A spot on the highest podium while your national anthem plays then will be the cherry on top.

The difficulty of depending on tomorrow for all your pleasure is well-described by Dan Greenburg and Marcia Jacobs. Their funny and all-too-true book is called How to Make Yourself Miserable.

The authors believe we manage the dreariness of our regular duties by looking toward to THE WEEKEND.

Unfortunately …

By Saturday morning you may be vaguely aware that Friday night wasn’t as great as you hoped it would be, but you don’t have much time to think about it because … you are still looking forward to the climax of THE WEEKEND — Saturday night. By Sunday afternoon, however, it is all over. Hope is dead. There is nothing further for you to look forward to, except the gloomy prospect of Monday morning and another whole week of drudgery at a job or school you detest. The weekend — like your life — can at last be viewed in its correct perspective: one colossal letdown, one gigantic anticlimax. On Sunday afternoon you are free to ponder all the great times you felt sure lay ahead, but never quite materialized.

We do need to suppose something better is in the offing — somewhere, somehow — and energize the resolve to get there. All those who trod a long educational road toward a career valued the lofty goal. The fathers of our antique religions realized the worth of a heavenly reward — a world without gravity — for the grave circumstances we ofttimes endure on earth. But, as Greenburg and Jacobs recognized, laughing at ourselves helps too, and sooner.

Just as a predictable joke is never funny, the most remarkable opportunities and joys take you by surprise.

In my own temporary stay on the planet, for example, I never contemplated that I might become a consultant to more than one major sports team. The unsought path just revealed itself.

Sure, I passed through down times and understand more will come, but I find little profit in attempting to improve the distance-vision of the nearsighted man I am. Indeed, if I live long enough, I’ll hesitate before buying unripe bananas. Most senior citizens are wise not to take a mental leap forward. They do well to make every day count.

Nothing is static. Expect sunny days and stormy weather and many partly cloudy skies. The ability to adjust to conditions is a skill necessary for you and me, both.

The largest portion of our contentment comes not beyond our noses, but by grabbing the beauty near at hand.

Of course, I have a surgically reconstructed left knee, so she may elude me.

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More on affective forecasting.

The first image, What Lies Ahead, was sourced from Eurotimes.org. The art work that follows is The Future of Statues, by Rene Magritte. It was sourced from Wikiart.org.

 

 

March 29, 2015

Don’t be too Sure of Yourself: Why We aren’t Good at Predictions

Poster_of_Alexander_Crystal_Seer

I’ve made my share of mistakes predicting the behavior of others. I am not alone. Political commentators and stock brokers are poor prognosticators, despite their cocky self-assurance. Still, you’d think an intelligent person might be able to anticipate the behavior of those around him — friends and co-workers of regular acquaintance.

Here are some reasons why few of us are good at this:

  1. The mistake of believing we think the same way. We have much in common with other humans, but not everything. Look around you at the superficial differences: bodies high as the sky or wide as a block; hairy and hairless; and all the hues of the rainbow if you include the artificial colors on top. Just as exteriors are unalike from person to person, so are the interiors. Your way of thought, perception, and motivation may be at odds with the person whose fortune you wish to tell. Don’t expect him to do what you might do.
  2. Situations vs. traits. Many folks are “nice” in the daily course of life. They pet dogs, smile at children, and make charitable donations. Under pressure, however, some apply vanishing cream to their virtue. I’ve observed people I thought I knew turn monstrous — like a wolfman at the full moon: lying, breaking promises, and embezzling. I am not talking about patients. These individuals rationalized their misbehavior using doctrines of fairness drawn from the “Bizarro World” and considered unscrupulous “means” permissible because of high-minded “ends.” MORAL: you don’t know for sure who you are dealing with until your counterpart has been tested by temptation or fear; rage, humiliation, or misfortune. The Stoic philosophers remind us to test ourselves. Only in this way, they believe, can we recognize ourselves as we are, let alone grasp the workings of anyone else. Indeed, they argue that self-improvement should be the goal of any good life.
  3. Expecting too much or too little. Some of us see the best in others, some expect only the worst. If your default prediction doesn’t match the behavioral tilt of the man whose actions you are trying to anticipate, you will be wrong.
  4. Simple explanations. The world is a complex place. Bolts within wrenches within hands. Existence is too convoluted to comprehend all the factors that might make it intelligible. We simplify life by using shortcuts and broad, pithy descriptions of one another: “He is cruel” or “He is greedy” or “He is hard-working,” for example. A more refined evaluation, however, would reveal a hard-working man at one job, uninvolved in another. Our labels are misapplied — too black or white. We are tempted to demonize too many. Equally, leave the halos for the angels, not your fellow-man.
  5. Absent historical data. Are you aware of the detailed life history of close friends? Even with knowledge of their every possible trauma and trouble, prediction is difficult.
  6. Absent current data. Perhaps your buddy is experiencing medication side-effects or coming off his antidepressants. Maybe his mother or spouse is dying. Changes like these can cause him to be a new man, not the man you know.
  7. Unresolved issues. A teen was a hell-raiser: she cut classes, ran away from home, shop-lifted  and had a too-early initiation into the world of sex. There were plenty of unfortunate explanations for this, but two decades on she appeared past “acting out” her troubles. Only she wasn’t. If you crossed her, she resumed the shape of the human wrecking ball she’d been at age 16. No one predicted it.
  8. Expecting logic to prevail. We are told not to converse about politics or religion. That is, not encourage our conversation partner to switch candidates, adopt a new religion, or give up faith altogether. Jonathan Haidt and other psychologists note that Homo sapiens tend to arrive at emotionally driven decisions about highly charged issues and only then think of reasons to support them. A failure to factor emotions into your estimation of future conduct reduces predictive success. We all have witnessed behavioral train wrecks when powerful emotions take charge of the flesh and blood locomotive.
  9. Self-destruction. Some folks burn down the barn to kill the rats. At the extreme, you find this in the Euripides play, Medea (she murdered her children because of betrayal by her husband, Jason) and in horrific murder-suicide news stories. Don’t expect future negative consequences to be considered in advance by everyone; and, even if noticed, to cause a course change.
  10. Actions and reactions. Life provides moving targets, rather like a computer game. A good chess player “sees” several moves ahead. A wise person also adjusts his next step in response to the after effects of his last. It is almost impossible to know what another will do unless you understand all the things he will meet down the road, including his reaction to anything you do.
  11. Poor affective (emotional) forecasting. Daniel Gilbert and colleagues looked at how happiness might be affected by work disappointment. They studied assistant professors at the University of Texas at Austin who either succeeded in getting tenure (the guarantee of a permanent job) or failed to achieve this goal (which usually means leaving for a different college or another line of work). Measures of happiness taken over a 10-year period indicated “the outcome of the tenure decision did not have a dramatic and robust influence on (the) general happiness (of the teachers).” The researchers concluded that we commonly ignore our emotional resilience and durability when imagining our future reaction to life’s disappointments. Put differently, we are lousy at forecasting our future emotional state. The divorce rate supports the same conclusion; as does the common, but erroneous, expectation of a wonderful life following a giant lottery award.

Without the ability to predict matters in our own lives, should we expect to read the tea leaves of others?

In summary, the next time you are about to take out your crystal ball, overconfident about your knowledge of the human condition, remind yourself of the following quote of H.L. Mencken. He was a scribe well-known for cutting us down in size:

No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby.

A little humility is a good thing to keep in your back pocket for those times when the cigar of hubris explodes in your face. I need all the humility I can get, otherwise I’d offer you some.

H.L.-Mencken-amused

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The top image is a 1910 poster of Alexander, Crystal Seer uploaded to English Wikipedia by Ali. The undated photo of the man with the cigar is H.L. Mencken.