The Impact Bias
"Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate, and you can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic. So, just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought.
However, interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. The fact is, that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives [graphs of these data are shown in the video embedded below].
Now, don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz, because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time. The research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, have revealed something really quite startling to us. Something we call the impact bias, which is the tendency for your mental simulator to work badly. For the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are.
From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. In fact, a recent study — this almost floors me — a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness" (Dan Gilbert, TED talk 2006).
One must wonder:
What influence the Impact Bias has had on the intense futuristic theorizations meanderings, ruminations, and intellectual exchanges that is the SpaceCollective?
Is it possible that a large portion of the posts on this dynamic infospheric platform are overblown, overreaching, and overprojected, as a result of this cognitive bias that is so robust that even those with the worst possible Amnesia (they always forget who they just met after 30 seconds or less) still fall victim to it?
Are we overestimating the impact of the future here in the future of everything playground? Are ideas like the Noosphere and Singularity grand products of our overweighting of the importance of future events, and underweighting the significance of the present (or past)?
Is the existence of this very site simply a product of a stilted reality perspective, a mindframe, that our implicit cognitions impose on our pre-frontal cortices to expect future events to give us more in affective as well as rational currency than it could ever possibly produce? Maybe.
For more of Dan Gilbert's research on cognitive biases and happiness:
"Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate, and you can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic. So, just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought.
However, interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. The fact is, that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives [graphs of these data are shown in the video embedded below].
Now, don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz, because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time. The research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, have revealed something really quite startling to us. Something we call the impact bias, which is the tendency for your mental simulator to work badly. For the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are.
From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. In fact, a recent study — this almost floors me — a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness" (Dan Gilbert, TED talk 2006).
One must wonder:
What influence the Impact Bias has had on the intense futuristic theorizations meanderings, ruminations, and intellectual exchanges that is the SpaceCollective?
Is it possible that a large portion of the posts on this dynamic infospheric platform are overblown, overreaching, and overprojected, as a result of this cognitive bias that is so robust that even those with the worst possible Amnesia (they always forget who they just met after 30 seconds or less) still fall victim to it?
Are we overestimating the impact of the future here in the future of everything playground? Are ideas like the Noosphere and Singularity grand products of our overweighting of the importance of future events, and underweighting the significance of the present (or past)?
Is the existence of this very site simply a product of a stilted reality perspective, a mindframe, that our implicit cognitions impose on our pre-frontal cortices to expect future events to give us more in affective as well as rational currency than it could ever possibly produce? Maybe.
For more of Dan Gilbert's research on cognitive biases and happiness: