Читать книгу The Psychology of Environmental Law - Arden Rowell - Страница 31

Perhaps surprisingly, people are not particularly good at anticipating how they will feel about things in the future: They cannot predict their own preferences well. As an objective matter, for instance, though we might think various life events will change our overall level of happiness permanently, in fact adaptation quickly sets in—something evocatively called the “hedonic treadmill.” One of the earliest and most colorful demonstrations of this was a comparison of the happiness levels of three types of people: those who had in the past won the lottery, those who had suffered a paralyzing accident, and controls who had experienced neither. After a certain period of time, all three groups exhibited roughly equal levels of happiness (Brickman et al., 1978). The explanation is presumably fairly simple: On any given day, one gets used to what one has and focuses mainly on the task at hand. Paraplegics still have personal relationships and jobs that bring them gratification; lottery winners still must deal with difficult relatives and attend their children’s umpteenth baseball practice of the season. This is related to the “present bias” issue discussed below (O’Donoghue & Rabin, 1999): People lose focus on the shock of the disrupting event of yesterday and concentrate more on living their lives today. In addition, they learn various coping mechanisms for dealing with the new reality, including simply readjusting their expectations and preferences to comport with their new circumstances—a sort of affective “immune system” response (Gilbert et al., 1998).

Subsequent experimental work begun by Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson demonstrated that despite the robustness of a happiness set point, people are relatively oblivious to it, even for events that they experience repeatedly (Gilbert et al., 1998; Wilson & Gilbert, 2003). For whatever reason, when trying to predict how an event will affect them, people focus on the event itself and fail to appreciate the compensations, mitigating circumstances, and adaptations that attend it (Wilson et al., 2000). The phenomenon is somewhat similar to how intentions fail to accurately predict action—people simply forget the myriad ways that intervening events and competing priorities can distract and subvert us from accomplishing even the sincerest goals (Poon et al., 2014; Poon & Koehler, 2006). Hedonic adaptation has its value, not least in preventing emotional swings that could otherwise interfere with daily functioning. After all, whether you are a lottery winner or a paraplegic, you still need to deal with your irritating cousin at Thanksgiving. But this just explains why hedonic adaptation is adaptive—it does not explain why people would routinely fail to anticipate it. And yet people do. They are perennially surprised by the finding that lottery winners and people who have been paralyzed are roughly equally happy.

Possibly, overpredicting the joy of good events and the despair of bad ones maintains incentives to seek out the former and avoid the latter. Regardless of the cognitive reason for the hedonic treadmill, however, such failures of affective forecasting have clear implications for environmental policy. When people are deciding the appropriate way to act today, based on the effects that action will have in the future, it is obviously important that they accurately anticipate what those effects will be. In the next section, we discuss the ways in which people’s predictions of future events might be incorrect based on distorted discount rates and loss aversion. Here we note that such errors can also arise because of their emotional impact. Even if we correctly predict the actuarial likelihood of a future outcome, if we misperceive its “goodness” or “badness” in an affective sense, then our incentives to seek it out or avoid it will be distorted.

How can we improve people’s affective forecasting capabilities? Calling people’s attention to the phenomenon of adaptation and encouraging them to consider intervening circumstances and events that would reduce the emotional impact of the future event have been shown to improve affective forecasting in at least some experimental circumstances (Ubel et al., 2005). Present emotional states also color our estimates of the effect of future outcomes (Loewenstein, 2005; Schwarz, 2000). Fear and anxiety, for instance, concentrates attention and so worsens the “focalism” problem of ignoring likely mitigating circumstances (Elster, 1998; LeDoux, 2002). Another promising ameliorative approach to the problem of affective forecasting is encouraging “mindfulness.” A tendency toward mindfulness (which is a nonjudgmental, present-focused internal state) has been shown to be negatively correlated with overestimating the effect that a future event will have on someone (Emanuel et al., 2010).

Interestingly, Gilbert, Wilson, and colleagues showed that one of the most effective interventions for improving affective forecasting is simply getting people to ask another person who has experienced the event how they responded to it. This is even more effective than telling them facts and details about the event itself. Unfortunately, this is of limited utility for future environmental impacts that nobody on earth has experienced (like the melting of polar ice caps) or where decision makers do not have easy access to those who might have experienced them. Moreover, people don’t tend to believe that others’ affective responses are better predictors of their own reaction than a careful consideration of the facts and details of the future event would be. Thus, even when they have access to both methods of estimation, they are likely to reject the technique that actually works better (Gilbert et al., 2009).