ImpactBias偏见的影响..doc

Impact Bias Cehajic, Alena Nikitina, Olga Pacheco, Patricia Definition: The impact bias, a form of which is the durability bias, in affective forecasting, is the tendency for people to overestimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states. In other words, people seem to think that if disaster strikes it will take longer to recover emotionally than it actually does. Conversely, if a happy event occurs, people overestimate how long they will emotionally benefit from it. In other words it is when a disaster is coming and people use to overestimate its damage. In the other hand, when a good event is going to occur people also allow too much for its profits. For example when a crisis, or if you broke with your girlfriend you think that you are going to feel very unhappy but finally it is not that difficult. Just to point out that there are a lot of research and studies that identified this bias, and proposed the name change to refer more broadly to all forms of emotional impact, including durability as well as intensity, and the rate of ascension and dissension, etc. Causes of the impact bias According to the article of Wilson and Gilbert (2005) there are two main reasons of the impact bias: Focalism: when people think about the impact of future event they tend to forget about all the other things that are going on in their lives. In reality the one event we are imagining will likely be overshadowed by all sorts of other events that happen at the same time. Sense-making: people have a natural tendency to rationalize what happens to them. When something bad happens we initially feel unhappy but immediately start searching for the underlying reasons. Once when we’ve decided on the cause(s) of this bad event, we start to feel better. How can you correct for the impact bias? Considering that these processes are probably unconscious it may be difficult. But evidence does suggest two options. When considering how a future event will affect you: think about all t