[1] People display an impact bias when they overestimate the intensity and durability of affect when making predictions about their emotional responses.
Early studies revealed that this phenomenon is a result of people’s inability to anticipate how their feelings will be affected by external factors, and change over time (e.g. Kahneman, 1994).
Then after waiting ten minutes, the experimenter presented all the participants with another questionnaire that once again asked them to report their current level of happiness.
The predictions made by the participants in both the unfair and fair groups were about the same regarding how they would feel immediately after hearing the news as well as ten minutes later.
The study showed that both groups felt much better than they had originally predicted, ten minutes later, demonstrating the impact bias.
People know that the future is uncertain, but fail to recognize their projections as construals, subjective perceptions or interpretations of reality.
It leads to the impact bias when misconstruals are accurate about the valence of an event, but overpredict intensity and duration of emotional reaction.
[6] Motivated Distortions: When faced with a negative event people may have forecasts that are overestimated and can evoke either comfort or fear in the present.
[4] This process is sometimes referred to as the projection bias (Loewenstein et al., 1999) whereby people’s affective forecasts are unconsciously or consciously influenced by their current state.
Results showed that the students largely overestimated their unhappiness when assigned to an undesired dormitory, as their overall happiness was nearly identical to those living in desired houses the following year.
[4] Immune Neglect: We have unconscious psychological processes such as ego defense, dissonance reductions, self-serving biases, etc.
People display retrospective impact bias when they overestimate the intensity and duration of an emotional reaction to a past event.