Concept
The impact bias
The impact bias is Daniel Gilbert's finding that people overestimate how strongly and how long future events will affect their feelings: good events make them less happy than predicted and for less time, bad events hurt less and for less time, consistently across cultures, ages and outcomes.
Ask people how they will feel a year after winning, losing, being promoted or being left, and they answer confidently and wrongly, in the same direction every time. The causes are the mechanics of imagination. It borrows the feeling of the present, so you predict the new job by how you feel now, thinking about it, when it is the only thing in view; Gilbert calls this presentism. It leaves out what it does not picture, the commute after the corner office, the Tuesdays after the wedding. And it fails to anticipate how quickly the mind rationalises whatever happens, which is why bad events hurt less than forecast. Haidt's hedonic adaptation is the same fact from the other side: you get used to almost everything. The practical rule is to discount every forecast of your own future feeling, in both directions, and to replace imagination with a surrogate.
A real-life example
A marketing manager in Ankara has imagined a Dubai directorship in detail for a year. Before accepting she asks a former colleague eighteen months into the same move about a normal Wednesday, hears about eleven-hour days and friends not made, and takes the role with a two-year limit written in. Six months on, nothing surprises her.
How to use it
- 1Discount every forecast of how you will feel next year, in both directions.
- 2Notice presentism: you are predicting with the feeling you have now, while the event is the only thing in view.
- 3Replace imagination with a surrogate, someone already living the outcome.