Collaborative Research: Improving the Accuracy of Affective Forecasting

十年的研究表明，人们通常无法预测某件事是否会让他们快乐，它会让他们多么快乐，以及这种快乐会持续多久。结果，人们在从社会和经济到法律的和医疗等重要领域做出了糟糕的决定。在过去的十年里，研究人员一直在努力寻找一种方法来提高人们预测的准确性，在很大程度上，他们通过尝试提高人们想象或“心理模拟”未来事件的准确性来做到这一点。这些尝试的结果令人失望。要么他们完全失败了，要么他们在有限的情况下成功了。这项拟议中的研究是基于这样一种论点，即提高情感预测准确性的最佳方法不是提高心理模拟，而是完全避免它。 相反，研究人员认为，要预测你将来会有多幸福，你应该遵循世纪散文家弗朗索瓦·德·拉罗什富科的建议：“在我们对任何事情过于上心之前，让我们先看看那些已经拥有它的人有多幸福。研究人员发现，这种仅基于另一个已经经历过该事件的人的报告来预测幸福的策略，被称为“替代”，可以大大提高预测。 事实上，在许多情况下，人们最好依靠一个随机选择的陌生人的经验，而不是依靠自己的自我认识和想象力！目前的研究涉及一系列新的研究，旨在探索在何种条件下代孕会和不会提高预测准确性，以及在何种条件下人们会和不可能使用它。人们在从社会和经济到法律的和医疗的重大领域做出糟糕的决定，部分原因是无法准确预测不同的行为会让他们感到多快乐。这项研究更广泛的影响是提供具体的方法来帮助人们做出更好的预测，从而做出更好的选择。

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.