Impact Bias
One of the most common sources of error in affective forecasting across various populations and situations is the impact bias, which is the tendency to overestimate the emotional impact of a future event, whether in terms of intensity or duration. Impact bias, including impact and durability bias findings are both robust and reliable errors found in affective forecasting. Studies have found that college students overestimated how happy or unhappy they would be after being assigned to a desirable or undesirable dormitory. Impact bias has also been found in retroactive assessments of the past events.
Some studies specifically address "durability bias," the tendency to overestimate the length of time future emotional responses will last. Even if people accurately estimate the intensity of their future emotions, they may not be able to estimate the duration of them. Durability bias is generally stronger in reaction to negative events. This is important because people tend to work toward events they believe will cause lasting happiness, and according to durability bias, people might be working toward the wrong things.
Proposed causes of impact bias include mechanisms like immune neglect and focalism, as well as misconstruals.The pervasiveness of impact bias in affective forecasts is of particular concern to healthcare specialists, in that it affects both patients' expectations of future medical events as well as patient-provider relationships. (See health.)
Read more about this topic: Affective Forecasting, Major Sources of Errors
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