Anticipating the Future

1
Anticipating the Future

• How the mind works processing using
  information to guide perception behavior.
• Understanding the past aids in understanding
  the present, preparing for future.
• Anticipating the future looking beyond the
  present.
• How do we foresee the future?
• Are we any good at it?
• How do cognitive processes influence that future?

2
Anticipating the Future

• Cognitive structures have expectancies --
• Based on past experiences
• Guide information processing
• Used in predicting future
• Guide perceptions, behavior
• Self-fulfilling prophecy expectancies creating
  (not perceptually distorting) reality.
• How does it work?

3
Anticipating the Future

• Consider two persons interacting A ?? B
• Person A has expectancy about Person B.
• A thinks B is unfriendly.
• As expectancy guides As own behavior toward B.
• A keeps her distance and is cool toward B.
• As expectancy influences Bs response to A.
• B responds to A in reserved manner.
• Bs response confirms As expectancy about B.
• A thinks, Yep, B sure isnt very friendly.
• Therefore, As expectancy has created behavioral
  confirmation. As perception is not distorted
  B was not friendly. Hence, a self-fulfilling
  prophecy.
• But A is unaware that her own expectancies and
  behavior have determined Bs behavior.

4
Anticipating the Future

• Affective forecasting
• Consider You experience a powerful event in
  your life.
• Version A Your lottery ticket has the winning
  number you win 600,000! You feel euphoric
  your life will never be the same!
• Version B One of your parents has been stricken
  with a serious, immobilizing illness, can no
  longer work. You must quit school, not graduate,
  go back home, get a job to help pay family bills.
  You are devastated your life will never be the
  same!

5
Anticipating the Future

• How long will these effects last? How long will
  feelings endure?
• Intuition powerful life events must have
  enduring emotional consequences.
• Research shows that even uncommon emotional
  events have less long-term impact than we might
  expect.
• Durability bias people overestimate duration of
  affective responses to life events (Gilbert et
  al., 1998 Wilson et al., 2000).
• Winning the lottery will make the rest of my
  life peaches and cream.
• I will never recover from having to quit
  school.

6
Anticipating the Future

• Why the durability bias? Several possible
  reasons
• Motivated distortions. Overestimation of
  duration of affective response may be motivated.
  Positive forecasts (Getting married will make my
  life wonderful!) induce positive affect.
  Negative forecasts brace against negative
  consequences, can make reality less negative
  (defensive pessimism).
• Undercorrection. May imagine initial affective
  response, then not correct sufficiently for
  passage of time.
• Focalism (Wilson et al., 2000). In predicting
  duration of affect, focus on the triggering event
  to the exclusion of other factors.

7
Anticipating the Future

• Immune neglect (Gilbert et al., 1998)
• People have a psychological immune system
• Defense mechanisms, self-serving biases,
  self-deception, self-enhancement, etc. --
• all of these protect person from continuing
  effects of adverse events. They limit impact
  (duration) of negative affect.
• Hypothesis people are unaware of effects
  (benefits) of this immune system. Immune
  neglect.
• Consequence failure to recognize that negative
  affect will not persist because psychological
  system will overcome it.
• Hence, immune neglect ? durability bias.

8
Anticipating the Future

• Strategy ask people to estimate duration of
  affective reaction to event, then measure
  duration of affect.
• Prediction overestimate duration of affective
  reaction.
• Why? Failure to recognize that effects are
  ameliorated by psychological mechanisms.

9
Anticipating the Future

• Tenure forecasting effects of yes/no decisions
• Assistant professors
• 92 former received tenure (positive exp.)
• 31 former denied tenure (negative exp.)
• 97 current (forecasters)
• Measures
• All overall happiness
• Forecasters how happy 5 years after
• Receiving tenure
• Not receiving tenure

10
Anticipating the Future

• Results mean happiness ratings
• Actual Forecast
• pos. neg. pos. neg.
• 5.24 4.71 5.90 3.42
• ns p lt .001
• Other studies parallel results
• Election duration of affect after favored
  candidate winning or losing
• Love duration of affect after dissolution of
  relationship

11
Recapping Where Weve Been

• How the mind works in a very social world.
• Constant stimulation, continuous information
  processing
• Numerous processes some thorough, systematic
  others short-cuts, biases.
• All are important for adaptation, anticipation,
  social coordination.

12
Recapping

• Major aspects of information processing
• Encoding
• Attention
• Interpretation
• Elaboration
• Evaluation and judgment
• Inference
• Attribution
• Representation and Retrieval
• Heuristics
• TRAP Model
• Understanding the past
• Reconstructive memory
• Counterfactual thinking
• Anticipating the future
• Self-fulfilling prophecies
• Affective forecasting

13
Recapping

• All of these processes influenced by cognitive
  structures
• Schemas, scripts, networks, etc.
• Self, impressions, stereotypes
• Expectancies
• All processes may be automatic or controlled
• Social cognition studying the cognitive
  structures and processes that underlie our
  interaction with a complex social world.
• Understanding social cognition the functions
  and roles of those structures and processes can
  help understanding the dynamics of social
  behavior.