Focalism: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting.

TLDR

The durability bias—overestimating how long future affective reactions last—may stem from focalism, where people concentrate on the event itself rather than on subsequent future events. The study tests whether prompting people to consider other future activities reduces the durability bias. Across five studies, prompting fans to think about future activities lowered overestimates of how long a football game would affect their happiness, ruled out alternative explanations, and suggested a distraction effect, with implications for the planning fallacy literature.

Abstract

The durability bias, the tendency to overpredict the duration of affective reactions to future events, may be due in part to focalism, whereby people focus too much on the event in question and not enough on the consequences of other future events. If so, asking people to think about other future activities should reduce the durability bias. In Studies 1-3, college football fans were less likely to overpredict how long the outcome of a football game would influence their happiness if they first thought about how much time they would spend on other future activities. Studies 4 and 5 ruled out alternative explanations and found evidence for a distraction interpretation, that people who think about future events moderate their forecasts because they believe that these events will reduce thinking about the focal event. The authors discuss the implications of focalism for other literatures, such as the planning fallacy.