PMID-19299622[0] The Surprising Power of Neighborly Advice.
- quote (I cannot say this any better!): "People make systematic errors when attempting to predict their affective reactions to future events, and these errors have social (1–3), economic (4–8), legal (9, 10), and medical (11–22) consequences. For example, people have been shown to overestimate how unhappy they will be after receiving bad test results (23), becoming disabled (14, 19–21), or being denied a promotion (24), and to overestimate how happy they will be after winning a prize (6), initiating a romantic relationship (24), or taking revenge against those who have harmed them (3). Research suggests that the main reason people mispredict their affective reactions to future events is that they imagine those events inaccurately (25). For example, people tend to imagine the essential features of future events but not the incidental features (26–28), the early moments of future events but not the later moments (17, 24), and so on. When mental simulations of events are inaccurate, the affective forecasts that are based on them tend to be inaccurate as well."
- solution, ala François de La Rochefoucauld: "Before we set our hearts too much upon anything," he wrote, "let us first examine how happy those are who already possess it"
- this is surrogation ; it relies not on mental simulation, hence is immune to the associated systematic errors.
- problem is that people differ. paper agues that, in fact, they don't all that much - the valuations & affective reactions are produced by evolutionarily ancient physiological mechanisms. Furthermore, people's neighbors, friends, and peers are likely to all be similar in personality and preference via self-selection and social reinforcement - hence their reactions to a situation will be similar.
- They used a speed-dating scenario in their experiments, from which they observe: "Women made more accurate predictions about how much they would enjoy a date with a man when they knew how much another woman in their social network enjoyed dating the man than when they read the man's personal profile and saw his photograph."
- Next, they employ personality-evaluation "Men and women made more accurate predictions about how they would feel after being evaluated by a peer when they knew how another person in their social network had felt after being evaluated than when they previewed the evaluation itself."
- Conclusion: "But given people's mistaken beliefs about the relative ineffectiveness of surrogation and their misplaced confidence in the accuracy of their own mental simulations (39), it seems likely that in everyday life, La Rochefoucauld's advice—like the advice of good neighbors—is more often than not ignored.
- Editorializing: I'm not quite convinced that 'neighborly advice' is an accurate predictor of our absolute reaction to a situation as much as it socially informs us of reaction we are *supposed* to have. Society by consensus - that's what some of my European friends dislike about (some parts of) American culture. They need to run some controls in other cultures (?)
____References____
[0] Gilbert DT, Killingsworth MA, Eyre RN, Wilson TD, The surprising power of neighborly advice.Science 323:5921, 1617-9 (2009 Mar 20) |
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