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Disability and Sunshine: Can Hedonic Predictions Be Improved by Drawing Attention to Focusing Illusions Or Emotional Adaptation?

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Disability and Sunshine: Can Hedonic Predictions Be Improved by Drawing Attention to Focusing Illusions Or Emotional Adaptation? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied In the public domain 2005, Vol. 11, No. 2, 111–123 DOI: 10.1037/1076-898X.11.2.111 Disability and Sunshine: Can Hedonic Predictions Be Improved by Drawing Attention to Focusing Illusions or Emotional Adaptation? Peter A. Ubel George Loewenstein Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences Carnegie Mellon University Christopher Jepson University of Pennsylvania People frequently mispredict the long-term emotional impact of circumstances. The authors examine 2 causes of such mispredictions—a focusing illusion and underappreciation of adaptation. In Experiment 1, the authors found, in 852 adults, that quality of life estimates (for living with disability) were not increased by reducing focusing illusions. In Experiment 2, the authors found, in 698 adults, that people’s disability estimates were increased by asking them to reflect on adaptation. In Experiment 3, the authors found, across 312 Midwestern college students, that both approaches reduced the participants’ predic- tions of the life satisfaction of their peers living in southern California. In the case of living in a better climate, the results suggest that attention to either cause influences people’s predictions, whereas in the case of chronic disability, the results suggest that it is easier to get people to appreciate adaptation than it is to reduce focusing illusions. Keywords: affective forecasting, focusing illusion, hedonic adaptation, impact bias Predicting how one will feel about future events is important for of feelings in the days following a victory or a loss (Wilson, making decisions as trivial as selecting a meal at a restaurant to Wheatley, Meyers, Gilbert, & Axsom, 2000). College students in those as momentous as choosing the right career. Despite the California assume that college students in the Midwest are signif- importance of such predictions, however, people frequently icantly less happy than they are, and Midwestern students also mispredict their own future feelings, overestimating the duration think that California students are happier, when in fact both groups (Frederick & Loewenstein, 1999; Wilson, Meyers, & Gilbert, report similar levels of happiness (Schkade & Kahneman, 1998). 2001) and intensity (Buehler & McFarland, 2001) of their reac- One of the most commonly replicated “happiness gaps” (Lacey, tions to positive and negative events. For example, college pro- Fagerlin, Loewenstein, Smith, & Ubel, 2005) is that observed fessors overestimate how long they will feel happiness if they between the self-rated quality of life of people with health condi- receive tenure and the duration of their unhappiness if they do not tions and healthy people’s estimates of what their quality of life (Gilbert et al., 1998), and football fans overestimate the intensity would be if they had those conditions: Patients with chronic disabilities report that their quality of life is significantly better than the public estimates that it would be. For example, Sackett and Torrance (1978) found that the general public estimates the Peter A. Ubel, Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medi- health-related quality of life (HRQoL) of dialysis at a value of .39 cine, Ann Arbor, Michigan; George Loewenstein, Department of Social (on a scale where 0 indicates conditions as bad as death and 1 and Decision Sciences and Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon indicates perfect health), whereas dialysis patients estimate their University; Christopher Jepson, Department of Psychiatry, University of HRQoL at .56. Using online mood assessments, Riis et al. (2005) Pennsylvania. This research was supported in part by a Presidential Early Career found that dialysis patients experienced positive moods the major- Award for Scientists and Engineers and by Grant RO1 HD40789-01 from ity of their waking hours, yet healthy people predicted that dialysis National Institute of Child Health and Human Development to Peter A. patients would experience unpleasant moods the majority of the Ubel. time. Boyd, Sutherland, Heasman, Tritchler, and Cummings We thank Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Gilbert, Timothy Wilson, and (1990) found that patients without colostomies estimated the David Schkade for helpful comments with our study design for Experiment HRQoL of living with a colostomy at .80, whereas patients with 1; Stacey McMorrow, Tara Mohr, Todd Roberts, Jennifer Heckendorn, and colostomies rated their own HRQoL at .92. A similar discrepancy Rachel Markowitz for research assistance; Laura Damschroder for data has been seen between rheumatoid arthritis patients and the gen- analysis assistance; and Tamara Savercool, Heidi Kutzley, and Holly Derry eral public (Hurst et al., 1994). for assistance in manuscript preparation. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Peter What is the source of these happiness gaps? One possible source A. Ubel, Center for Behavioral and Decision Sciences in Medicine, is measurement bias or error. People’s self-reported happiness 300 North Ingalls, Room 7C27, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-0429. E-mail: could be influenced by scale recalibration, which occurs if pa- [email protected] tients (or college students in the Midwest) norm their scale relative 111 112 UBEL, LOEWENSTEIN, AND JEPSON to other patients (or college students) or renorm it relative to the that fade over time, people might forget to consider this charac- lower lows that they experience. However, Baron et al. (2003) teristic of emotions when predicting their long-term happiness found that the gap was larger rather than smaller when scale following good or bad events. endpoints and midpoint were defined objectively. Likewise using In an earlier study, we explored whether a focusing illusion a somewhat different methodology, Lacey et al. (2005) found that contributes to the tendency for healthy persons to underestimate people with a serious chronic lung disease not only rated the the quality of life reported by people with disabilities (Ubel et al., quality of life associated with lung disease as higher than did those 2001). We asked participants to estimate the quality of life asso- who did not have serious lung disease but also ranked lung disease ciated with paraplegia, below the knee amputation (BKA), or higher (i.e., less bad) relative to a list of 24 bad things (deliberately partial blindness. Then we attempted to defocus participants by chosen to span the range of badness) that could happen. The having them reflect on the impact that these disabilities would ranking results, in particular, were inconsistent with scale have on a wide range of life domains. We felt that this defocusing recalibration. task would keep people from thinking too narrowly about the life Alternatively, the happiness gap could result from patients mis- domains affected by the disability. For example, we asked people representing their actual quality of life—for example, reporting to think about how such a disability would affect their family life, high quality of life despite frequent periods of misery. However, assuming that for most it would have little effect. Contrary to our such an account would predict a smaller discrepancy if one mea- hypothesis, we found that the defocusing task did not cause par- sured moment-to-moment feelings rather than overall evaluations, ticipants to look more favorably (or at least less unfavorably) on a which Riis et al. (2005) failed to find. These and other plausible life with disability, but instead decreased their average estimates of alternative accounts attribute the gap to measurement error. None, the quality of life associated with such disabilities. however, have been shown to account for the happiness gap (for In contrast to earlier studies that have documented focusing reviews see Ubel, Loewenstein, & Jepson, 2003; Ubel, Loewen- illusions in domains as diverse as geographic location and reac- stein, Schwarz, & Smith, in press). Thus, our attention naturally tions to ball games, our prior results do not provide support for the turns to accounts that attribute the gap to mispredictions on the part existence of a focusing illusion when it comes to chronic health of nonpatients. conditions. What could account for this discrepancy? One possi- Two major explanations have been advanced for why people bility is that healthy people’s ratings are, in fact, biased by a might overestimate the emotional impact of future events. First, focusing illusion, but we failed to detect it because our defocusing some researchers have attributed the happiness gap at least in part task was ineffective. If this is true, then we should be able to to a focusing illusion: When anticipating future events, people demonstrate a focusing illusion by using a superior defocusing focus disproportionately on, and thus exaggerate the importance task. Alternatively, it is possible that the focusing illusion exists of, things that would change in the future while ignoring things only for some types of events and not others. If this is true, then no that would remain the same. For example, Schkade and Kahneman focusing illusion should be detected even when a proven defocus- (1998) found that students in both California and the Midwest ing task is used. predict that they would be significantly happier living in California We report results from three experiments that extend our pre- than in the Midwest, and this prediction correlated strongly with vious work in an attempt to tease out these alternative explanations how important the students felt weather was
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