The impact bias, a form of which is the durability bias, in affective forecasting

Affective forecasting

Affective forecasting is the forecasting of one's affect in the future. This kind of prediction is affected by various kinds of cognitive biases, or systematic errors of thought also known as "empathy gap" and "impact bias"....

, is the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states.

In other words, people seem to think that if disaster strikes it will take longer to recover emotion

Emotion

Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...

ally than it actually does. Conversely, if a happy event occurs, people overestimate how long they will emotionally benefit from it.

Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson

Timothy Wilson

Timothy D. Wilson is the Sherrell J. Aston Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia and a researcher of self-knowledge and affective forecasting.-Career:...

 first identified this bias, and proposed the name change to refer more broadly to all forms of emotional "impact", including durability as well as intensity, and the rate of ascension and descension, etc. Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman

Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-American psychologist and Nobel laureate. He is notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, behavioral economics and hedonic psychology....

 has also contributed research on this cognitive bias

Cognitive bias

A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in judgment that occurs in particular situations. Implicit in the concept of a "pattern of deviation" is a standard of comparison; this may be the judgment of people outside those particular situations, or may be a set of independently verifiable...

.

A possible explanation for the impact bias is given by the theory of cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance

Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying,...

: most times people are very good at reducing cognitive dissonance, but, since it happens unconsciously, do not know it.

External links

• Video of Gilbert discussing humans' failure to predict what makes us happy. Presented July 2005 at the TED Conference in Oxford, UK. Duration: 22:02