Affective Forecasting - Major Sources of Errors - Immune Neglect

Immune Neglect

Gilbert et al. originally coined the term "immune neglect" (or "immune bias") to describe a function of the psychological immune system. Immune neglect refers to forecasters' unawareness of their tendency to adapt to and cope with negative events. Bolger & Zuckerman found that coping strategies vary between individuals and are influenced by their personalities They assumed that since people generally do not take their coping strategies into account when they predict future events, that people with better coping strategies should have a bigger impact bias, or a greater difference between their predicted and actual outcome. Hoerger et al. examined this further by studying college students’ emotions for football games. They found that students who generally coped with their emotions instead of avoiding them would have a greater impact bias when predicting how they’d feel if their team lost the game. They found that those with better coping strategies recovered more quickly after Since the participants did not think about their coping strategies when making predictions, those who actually coped had a greater impact bias. Those who avoided their emotions, felt very closely to what they predicted they would. Hoerger ran another study on immune neglect after this, which studied both daters and non-daters forecasts about Valentine’s Day, and how they would feel in the days that followed. Hoerger found that different coping strategies would cause people to have different emotions in the days following Valentine’s Day, but participants’ predicted emotions would all be similar. This shows that most people do not realize the impact that coping can have on their feelings following an emotional event. He also found that, not only did immune neglect create a bias for negative events, but also for positive ones. This shows that people continually make inaccurate forecasts because they do not take into account their ability to cope & overcome emotional events.