Collaborative Research: Dual Standards in Affective Forecasting and Experience

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Most decisions are based on predictions about how much hedonic value --that is, how much pleasure, satisfaction, utility, or reward -- different alternatives will bring. People make important decisions about which home to buy, which person to marry, which medical treatment to accept, and so on by estimating the hedonic value that each of these experiences will afford. But in the last decade, research by psychologists and behavioral economists has shown that these estimates are often wrong. That is, people often mispredict the hedonic value of future experiences and thus make suboptimal decisions that they later regret. Why does this happen?Both the estimated and actual hedonic value of an experience depends on the other experiences to which it is compared. For example, chemotherapy may seem worse when compared with simple surgery than with a debilitating course of radiation. The comparisons people make are of two types. When a person compares an experience with other experiences he or she has had, will have, or could have had (e.g., At least this chemotherapy is not making me feel as bad as the radiation would have), the value of the experience is influenced by differences. But when a person compares an experience with the experience he or she was having in the previous moment (e.g., I am more nauseous than I was a few minutes ago), the value of the experience is influenced by changes.The researchers suggest that as a general rule, when people are estimating the hedonic value of future experiences they tend to compute differences, but when they are actually having hedonic experiences they tend to compute changes. Because people make different comparisons at these two times, they often mispredict the hedonic value of future experiences. This proposal describes 13 studies that seek to investigate the causes and consequences of this phenomenon.