Collaborative Research: Improving the Accuracy of Affective Forecasting

十年的研究表明，人们往往无法预测某事是否会让他们幸福，会让他们有多幸福，以及这种幸福会持续多久。其结果是，人们在从社会和经济到法律和医疗等相关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，而且在很大程度上，他们是通过试图提高人们想象或“心理模拟”未来事件的准确性来做到这一点的。这些尝试的结果令人失望。他们要么彻底失败了，要么在有限的情况下取得了成功。这项研究是基于这样一种观点，即提高情感预测准确性的最好方法不是改善心理模拟，而是完全避免它。相反，研究人员辩称，要预测你未来的幸福程度，你应该遵循17世纪散文家弗朗索瓦·德拉罗什福科的建议：“在我们对任何事情下定决心之前，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，这种完全基于另一个已经经历过这一事件的人的报告来预测幸福感的策略，被称为“代孕”，可以显著提高预测效果。事实上，在许多情况下，人们依靠一个随机选择的陌生人的经历比依靠他们自己的自知之明和想象力更好！目前的研究涉及一系列新的研究，旨在探索代孕在什么情况下会和不会提高预测精度，以及在什么情况下人们会和不可能使用代孕。人们在从社会和经济到法律和医疗的后续领域做出糟糕的决定，部分原因是无法准确预测不同的行动会让他们有多快乐。这项研究的更广泛影响是提供具体方法，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.