The authors compared people’s views of their histories and futures by asking them to recall and anticipate personally significant episodes. It was hypothesized and found in Study 1 that individuals spontaneously recall an affectively mixed past, containing both “highs” and “lows,” whereas they anticipate homogeneously ideal futures. It was further hypothesized that people devote little …
Tag Archives: prediction
Wilson, T. D., &Gilbert, D. T. (2005). Affective forecasting: Knowing what to want. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(3), 131-134.
People base many decisions on affective forecasts, predictions about their emotional reactions to future events. They often display an impact bias, overestimating the intensity and duration of their emotional reactions to such events. One cause of the impact bias is focalism, the tendency to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts …
Peetz, J., &Buehler, R. (2009). Is there a budget fallacy? The role of savings goals in the prediction of personal spending.
The authors extend research and theory on self prediction into the realm of personal financial behavior. Four studies examined people’s ability to predict their future personal spending and the findings supported the two main hypotheses. First, participants tended to underestimate their future spending. They predicted spending substantially less money in the coming week than they …