Edition: U.S. / Global

In Forecasting Their Emotions, Most People Flunk Out

Published: February 16, 1999

Everyone is a forecaster, says Dr. Daniel Gilbert, a psychologist at Harvard University, trafficking not in the day-to-day weather, but in individual emotional barometers.

And in making decisions, any decisions, people rely on their individual forecasts to determine how their choices will make them feel in the future, and then use those forecasts to guide their choices.

But, like some weather forecasts, it appears those predictions are often wrong, according to an array of data from a small but growing field of psychology.

Beginning a recent scientific paper in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Dr. Gilbert wrote: ''Imagine that one morning your telephone rings and you find yourself talking to the King of Sweden, who informs you in surprisingly good English that you have been selected as this year's recipient of a Nobel Prize. How would you feel and how long would you feel that way?''

Then, he continued: ''Now imagine that the telephone call is from your college president, who regrets to inform you (in surprisingly good English) that the Board of Regents has dissolved your department, revoked your appointment and stored your books in little cardboard boxes in the hallway. How would you feel and how long would you feel that way?''

In the second instance, Dr. Gilbert wrote, ''Losing one's livelihood has all the hallmarks of a major catastrophe, and most people would expect this news to have an enduring negative impact on their emotional lives.''

But, he added, ''Such expectations are often important and often wrong.''

Dr. Gilbert studied more than 100 college professors before and after they found out whether they had achieved tenure. He found that the educators expected to be quite happy if chosen, and quite unhappy if not. But those predictions were wrong. Those who got tenure were happy, but not as happy as they themselves had predicted. And those who were denied tenure did not become very unhappy.

There is a now a long list of such experiments.

Lottery winners, for example, were interviewed several times after they won big jackpots (averaging almost $500,000). While people expected to feel considerably happier for a long time, the winners, after a very brief euphoria, in fact found their level of happiness settling quickly back to average.

Students, asked whether they would be happier going to school in California or in a colder climate, predicted they would be happier in California, both because of the climate, and over all. In fact, students were equally happy in different parts of the country, despite the climate.

And people who were tested for Huntington's disease or H.I.V. infection expected to be devastated if the news was bad, but most often they were not; in fact, those who remained most anxious were those who decided not to be tested or, in the case of testing for Huntington's, were not to be told their test results.

People are aware that they are bad at some predictions. Dr. George Loewenstein of the Center for the Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Carnegie Mellon University offered some well-known examples of the results of poor forecasting: ''Besides marrying too young, there is shopping for groceries on an empty stomach; professions of love during moments of lust; believing you can 'eat just one chip.' ''

There is a pattern to the way people get predictions wrong, and understanding the pattern may be useful, researchers say.

For example, people are most often right when they describe what makes them feel good or bad, but are often wrong when asked to predict how strongly they will feel that way, and how long the feeling will last.

The problem comes with the nature of feelings, caused by strong chemical events in the brain that occur after an experience. The feeling itself quickly dies, as the mind shifts attention and the surge of chemicals subsides. When the event is recalled later, the rush of the feeling recurs, but to a lesser degree.

Dr. Gilbert points out that this is not just the gradual lessening of vividness, but that the mind has a number of active processes that alter the memory and blunt the feeling on purpose. Beginning almost immediately, we obscure the irritating or humiliating in the same way an oyster covers a grain of sand with a layer of smooth pearl.

Studies have shown that even severe life events have a negative impact on people's sense of well-being and satisfaction for no more than three months, after which their feelings at least go back to normal.

''Most people are reasonably happy most of the time, and most events do little to change that for long,'' Dr. Gilbert said.

He quotes Sir Thomas Browne, a 17th-century writer, who said: ''I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty into riches, adversity into prosperity, and I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me.''

Dr. Gilbert said that whatever that thing was that Browne claimed to have, ''most ordinary people seem to have it, too.''

''In science, literature and folklore,'' Dr. Gilbert said, ''people are famous for making the best of bad situations, remembering their successes and overlooking their excesses, trumpeting their triumphs and excusing their mistakes. Psychologists from Freud to Festinger have described the artful methods by which the human mind ignores, augments, transforms and rearranges information in its unending battle'' against the bad feelings produced by the world and things in it.