life is life

This week's video was acquired through an extensive youtube search...haha it just applied too well.

So this week has been interesting in a lot of ways—I have been reminded constantly of social psych ideas and terms as they pertain to my personal life. However, being as it is my “personal” life, I don’t have a strong desire to share the applications through this particular outlet. Soooo, I’ve decided to stroll back down memory lane and take a quick look at my epic high school days.

Ok, you're probably tired of the Avril. Here's some good music for you...

Affective forecasting is a process that involves imagining hypothetical events in the future and making predictions about the feelings that one would experience if that event were to occur (Gilbert et al., 2004). All this to say, affective forecasting is predicting the way you would feel if, say, that hot boy in your stats class asked you on a date, or if you got an F on that mid-term. Surprisingly (in my opinion), people are actually really bad at making such predictions. For some reason, we overestimate exactly HOW happy or excited or sad or scared we will feel in any given situation, as well as for HOW LONG we will feel that way. This is called the impact or durability bias.

I am a planner, without a doubt. I am the type of person who dedicates a half an hour every Sunday to planning which homework assignments I will do each day. Every semester, I make a list of goals that I want to accomplish. At any given point I can give you a rough outline of my five-year plan.

I say this with the intention of explaining that it was not out of the ordinary, my freshman year in high school, when I decided my life was not going to “start” until my junior year. Until then, I decided, I was just coasting, waiting for things to get interesting. Junior year, in my opinion, was the cool grade. I’d be able to drive to school, I’d have my first real job, and I just KNEW I’d be cast in a bigger role in a theatrical performance. It seemed to me like upperclassmen had it all figured out.

I guess you could say my affective forecast was that my junior year would make me super satisfied and happy. I thought that I would feel independent because I’d have a car, that my social life would be flawless, that I’d have a hot boyfriend, that I’d love my extracurriculars, and I’d have a really cool job. There was no doubt in my mind that my satisfaction and happiness would last through the year and maybe partially into my senior year.

Clearly, if you paid attention at all to my layman’s definition of affective forecasting, then you know that things didn’t quite unfold this way. I did get a car and a job, and I had a boyfriend and two best friends who I did everything with, and I was the lead in a musical. And while I was happy with where I was (particularly about having a car), it was short-lived. I realized that I wasn’t nearly as happy as I expected. I kind of took my car and job for granted after awhile, I started having inevitable problems with my friends and boyfriend (relationships are messy sometimes—fact of life), and the musical wasn’t super successful.

I don’t say any of this in a supplication sort of way, to make you feel bad for me or want to console me or give me something nice for Christmas.

The reason I say it is to explain that I was so obsessed with the emotional impact of these cool things that came along with junior year—you know, the car, job, sexy man and cool friends—that I didn’t really take into consideration that I would have other things going on too. For instance, I still had to drive to school every day, which kind of took the romance out of my newfound independence.  Also, I neglected to consider exactly how inevitable conflict is in relationships. I’d venture to say that junior year in high school was the most challenging social experience of my life to this day.

Life is life, in every stage of it. No matter how much money you have or how great your circumstances are, the grass is never quite green enough in the stage that you’re experiencing. That’s why we make these inaccurate predictions, I guess. In my humble opinion, though, everyone should know about the lies of affective forecasting. Maybe if I had realized that I wasn’t going to love junior year quite as much as I initially thought, I would have made more of an effort to enjoy freshman and sophomore year. Just something to think about.

Thanks for reading!

~Sarah Elizabeth

Gilbert, D. T., Morewedge, C. K., Risen, J. L., & Wilson, T. D. (2004). Looking forward

to looking backward: The misprediction of regret. Psychological Science, 15, 346-350.