Collaborative Research: Improving the Accuracy of Affective Forecasting

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A decade of research has shown that people often can't predict whether something will make them happy, how happy it will make them, and how long that happiness will last. As a result, people make poor decisions in consequential domains ranging from the social and economic to the legal and medical. Researchers have worked hard over the past decade to find a way to improve the accuracy of peoples' predictions, and for the most part they've done this by trying to improve the accuracy with which people imagine or "mentally simulate" future events. The results of these attempts have been disappointing. Either they've failed completely, or they've been successful in limited circumstances.The proposed research is based on the argument that the best way to improve the accuracy of affective forecasting is not to improve mental simulation, but to avoid it entirely. Instead, the investigators argue that to predict how happy you will be in the future you should follow the 17th century essayist François de La Rochefoucauld's advice: "Before we set our hearts too much upon anything, let us first examine how happy those are who already possess it." The investigators have found that this strategy for predicting happiness based solely on the report of another person who has already experienced that event, referred to as "surrogation," can improve predictions dramatically. Indeed, in many circumstances people are better off relying on the experience of a single randomly-selected stranger than on their own self-knowledge and imaginations! The current research involves a new series of studies designed to explore the conditions under which surrogation will and will not improve prediction accuracy as well as the conditions under which people are and are not likely to use it.People make poor decisions in consequential domains ranging from the social and economic to the legal and medical, in part as a consequence of being unable to accurately predict how happy different actions will make them. The broader impact of this research is to provide concrete ways to help people make better predictions and, as a consequence, better choices.