Impact bias: why you misjudge future feelings.
Impact bias is overestimating how intense and how long your emotional reaction to an event will be. So when you picture leaving your job, you likely expect a bigger and longer lift than you will get. Indeed, students choosing dormitories showed exactly this, and yet the gap they predicted disappeared.
Four numbers from a housing lottery.
First, before a housing lottery, students rated how happy they would be a year later in each dormitory. They predicted about 5.9 for the desirable building and about 3.4 for the undesirable one. However, a year later Elizabeth Dunn, Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert asked again.
The answers were about 5.4 and about 5.3. As a result, a gap of two and a half points shrank to one tenth of a point. Even so, nobody lied, and nobody was stupid.
How Wilson and Gilbert define impact bias.
Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert named the impact bias in 2005. In their words, it means "overestimating the intensity and duration" of emotional reactions. For example, one cause is focalism, which means underestimating how much other events will shape your thoughts. Also, people fail to anticipate how quickly they make sense of what happens, which speeds their recovery.
You are picturing the leaving, not the Tuesday.
Focalism is, in fact, the definition with your name on it. For instance, when you imagine life after you leave, you picture the dramatic exit. Instead, you are not picturing the ordinary Tuesday that follows. But the Tuesday is where you will actually live, week after week.
Catch your impact bias on paper tonight.
First, rate from one to seven how happy you will be a year from now if you leave.
Then rate a year from now if you stay unchanged, and write both numbers down before reading further.
From the book.
Timothy Wilson and Daniel Gilbert named the thing in 2005, and their definitions are worth having in their own words rather than mine. The impact bias is "overestimating the intensity and duration" of your emotional reactions to an event. One cause of it is focalism, which they define as "the tendency to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts and feelings", and another is that people fail to anticipate how quickly they will make sense of whatever happens to them, in a way that speeds their own recovery.
I Want to Start a Business but I Can't Quit My Job, chapter 6: You are guessing how it will feel, and the guess is wrong
Questions about impact bias.
Does impact bias mean my decision to leave is wrong?
No, it means your forecast of the feeling is probably too large. Instead, the decision can still be right for other reasons.
Why should I write my two numbers down now?
Because once you know where the argument goes, you will not be able to reconstruct them honestly.
What is focalism in simple terms?
In short, it is underestimating how much other events in your life will influence your thoughts and feelings after a change.
Read the whole chapter.
This lesson covers one section of chapter 6, “You are guessing how it will feel, and the guess is wrong”. The book goes further, with the full evidence, the stories and every exercise.
Lessons in this chapter.
- 01 Impact bias: why you misjudge future feelings.
- 02 Focusing illusion: why your job gets too much weight.
- 03 Self employed life satisfaction: the five-year gap.
- 04 Job satisfaction vs life satisfaction: two scores.
- 05 Hedonic adaptation: why autonomy does not wear off.
- 06 Impact bias criticism: what the research can claim.
- 07 Mood diary: a one-line log for two weeks.
- 08 Arrival fallacy: what reaching a goal really felt like.