My Imagination Versus Your Feelings: Can Personal Affective ForecastsBe Improved by Knowing Other Peoples' Emotions?

摘要

A proposed remedy for biased affective forecasts is to base judgments on the actual feelings of people(surrogates) currently experiencing the event, rather than using imagination which conjures an inaccuratevision of the future. Gilbert et al. (2009) forced people to use surrogate reports by withholding all eventinformation, resulting in better predictions. However, in life surrogate information rarely supplants eventinformation—can people effectively integrate both types of information into their judgments? In fivestudies, respondents predicted the impact of a health state on their own happiness. Respondentsincorporated surrogate information into their judgments both in the presence and absence of eventinformation. However, they inappropriately discounted other people's experiences as a valid predictor oftheir own—particularly in the presence of event information—and imagined their happiness would bedifferent to surrogates' happiness. Excluding preexisting event knowledge, changing the size of thesurrogate sample, or increasing the size of the response scale did not alter the adjustment. Althoughsurrogate information improved affective forecasts, its influence was diminished by the presence of eventinformation.