Psychology

Trying to Predict the Future

Posted on June 7, 2013. Filed under: anger, emotion, family, Health, life, love, memory, Psychology, relationships, therapy, Writing | Tags: health, love, relationships |

If you find yourself more concerned about highly publicized dangers that grab your immediate attention such as terrorist attacks, while forgetting about the more mundane threats such as global warming, you’re not alone. And you can’t help it because it’s human nature. That’s because people tend to view their immediate emotions, such as their perceptions of threats or risks, as more intense and important than their previous emotions.

 In one part of the study focusing on terrorist threats, researchers presented two scenarios to people in a college laboratory depicting warnings about traveling abroad to two countries. Participants were then asked to report which country seemed to have greater terrorist threats. Many of them reported that the country they last read about was more dangerous. What these findings show is that when people learn about risks, they will respond more strongly to what is right in front of them. Whatever the perceived threat of the moment is, will ‘crowd out’ concern about other threats, even if those other threats are actually more dangerous or more likely to occur. Because we are so emotionally influenced when it comes to assessing and reacting to threats, we may ignore very dangerous threats that happen not to be very emotionally arousing.

Human emotions stem from a very old system in the brain. When it comes to reacting to threats, real or exaggerated, it goes against the grain of thousands of years of evolution to just turn off that emotional reaction. It’s not something most people can do. And that’s a problem, because people’s emotions are fundamental to their judgments and decisions in everyday life. One of the things we know about how emotional reactions work is that they are not very objective, so people can get outraged or become fearful of what might actually be a relatively minor threat. One worry is some people are aware of these kinds of effects and can use them to manipulate our actions in ways that we may prefer to avoid.

 Your brain is remarkably capable of making strong associations between paired cues (e.g., the growl of a tiger and threat). These associations involve the integration of multiple sensations (sight, sound, taste, touch, smell) and brain processing. Under ideal conditions, this capacity for association allows the brain to rapidly identify threat-associated sensory information. This allows you to act rapidly and promote long term survival. Learning the association between the growl of a vicious looking pit bull and danger should only take one experience. After that the experience of a growl is generalized to imply danger. Yet, the remarkable capacity of the brain to take a specific event and generalize, particularly with regard to threatening stimuli, makes humans vulnerable to false generalizations. This is explains why you get anxious without any obvious cause.

 When observing a situation, the unconscious mind uses a little evidence to confirm a pre-existing theory. Let’s say, walking to work you smell smoke and hear a siren in the distance. Instantly, you picture a building on fire. However, contrary to the memorable information you have acquired on fire prevention, there is no fire. The smell of smoke is from a barbecue, and the siren is from a traffic cop. Here are two unrelated events that have been unconsciously associated and explained away by a pre-existing generalization. 

 Generalizations provide explanations for how things work and relate to one another. You seek explanations for everything. The brain then takes these explanations and makes generalizations to offer organization for how the world works. Generalizations are useful, they allows you to focus your attention on other things. Imagine eating a meal. Other than when to begin, the process of eating is automatic. No thought is required for raising a sandwich to your mouth. All of the actions are habits and operate on established patterns. The solution to the problem, of how to eat is made unconsciously, on autopilot. There are both physical and mental autopilots. Your mind does not have to think about how to eat, but it can if you want it to. In a similar way, if permitted to do so, the mind will analyze and interpret the world around you based on an autopilot-like setting. Imagine seeing someone in a white lab coat running across a road. They are headed towards two cars that are stopped by the roadside. People are milling around. You assume that someone is hurt. The person in the white coat is probably a doctor and there has been an accident. With just a few clues, you are able to paint a mental picture of what is happening.

 Generalizations cause you to believe in the conclusion that your mind jumped to, based on a few scraps of information. For example, the newspaper reports an increase in drug-related crimes in your community. In a separate report, you read that immigrants have been arrested. Using mental shortcuts, your mind relates the two stories and comes to a conclusion that you believe is logical. Without any real evidence, you start to believe that crime and immigration are related. Over time you pay special attention to any news reports that appear to support your position and gradually become ever more convinced. To your mind, it is more important to have an explanation than to have an explanation that is accurate. So, reality and imagination get blurred and the boundary between the two is lost. A generalization implies, where there’s smoke, there’s fire. Therefore, you assume your negative possibilities reflect reality.

 A lecturer told me once: a million white swans cannot prove all swans are white. All it takes is one black swan to disprove that statement. This is how generalization works. Here you focus on the exception, the one black swan out of the million and uses it to prove the statement: “All swans are black.” So this style of emotional thinking implies if you fail at one thing, you will fail in everything else, so why try? Doesn’t this sound absurd? Hardly, I have a friend who once saw himself as a failure in life when he realized he didn’t fix a leaking faucet properly. He was a wealthy businessman, a loving father, a caring son, a thoughtful friend and a responsible person. But he felt since he couldn’t fix some as simple a leaking faucet he had failed and was a failure. He became his actions. He based his worth as a person on a single incident and piece of evidence. For example, I had a client who had a romantic rejection. He became consumed wth the the thought that, “Girls just don’t like me. I’ll always be alone.” Yet we all do this to some degree. If something bad happens to you once, you will then see it as a possibility of something that can happen again. ‘Always’ and ‘never’ are cues that this style of thinking is being utilized. These words make broad, sweeping assumptions that can lead to a restricted life, as you avoid future failures based on the single incident or event. When you make a false generalization, you are really trying to predict the future. You are trying to “head it off at the pass,” to prevent disaster before it occurs, but you are not living in reality. You are not in control. You are living in fear of impending disaster in the future.  This is one of the main sources of anxiety in our lives.  It is very stressful indeed.

 I recently saw a client who was a loving mother, but experienced terrible anxiety related to the welfare of her children. She would be driving home from the store, while her kids, who were quite young, were safely at home with the babysitter. As she drove, some of the thoughts that would run through her head would be, “I wonder how things are going at home … that babysitter is a good one … she seems to always take such good care of the kids … I wonder if she is okay right now … I wonder if the kids are okay right now … sometimes that babysitter isn’t completely responsible … I’ll bet that babysitter has taken my kids outside to play in the park … that babysitter has probably taken the kids for a walk and left them alone far from my home … That awful babysitter has left my kids on their own and they don’t know how to get back home … my kids are in danger! … somebody is going to kidnap my kids and do very bad things to them … this kidnapper is going to hurt my kids very badly … and it is all my fault because I’m a terrible mother!!!”

 By this time my client was having a panic attack. Her hands would ferociously clutch the steering wheel, her heartbeat would soar, and her thoughts would race madly about all the possible horrible things that were happening to her kids. She would drive home barely able to control herself for fear of what has become of her kids. She was literally driving herself crazy because of her worry filled thoughts about her kids. Of course, when she arrives home, her kids would be fine. They were happily playing with the babysitter and enjoying a pleasant afternoon in the backyard of their home. This loving mother had allowed her fearful thoughts to completely control her, to the point where she was doing major damage to her physical and emotional well-being. She was flooding her body with stress hormones and internally creating, a full-fledged stress response very much like what she would need if she were being chased by a big grizzly bear and had to protect her children from attack. Yet, as she was driving home, she could do absolutely nothing about what was happening with her kids and the babysitter. She had no control. She could not predict nor prevent any part of what was happening there. Meanwhile, her worrisome thoughts were completely immobilizing her and preventing her from enjoying some time to herself.

 Whenever you worry about something, you are not really focusing on the event itself, but on the potentially painful, dangerous, or uncomfortable outcomes that may be associated with that event. Anxiety, worry or fear happens when you are letting thoughts about things that may or may not happen preoccupy your mind, rather then letting your thoughts focus on what is happening right here and now. These feelings are a way to plan and prepare you for a possible threat to your happiness. However, worry is not the same thing as planning. Planning occurs when you bring future moments into the present so you can apply appropriate control on those future events. When you plan, you are using your present moments in a useful way to appropriately prepare you for a future event or experience. When you worry, you focus on the possible painful outcomes that you associate with some future event. You are letting your present moment be filled with what “might” happen (and usually doesn’t).

 Humans cannot predict the future, but we try. We are hardwired to plan. Humans planned for the cold winter months and were able to survive by saving food. Yet, humans are not fortune tellers that can predict the future. Nor can any human flap their arms and fly. We are just good at planning. We do not have the ability to predict the weather, how can we assume we can accurately know what will happen next in life. We like to think we know, but we don’t. Emotional thinking is deceptive. Emotional thinking is very certain and gives extraordinary confidence to your conclusions, even if they seem like a long shot. This is why I don’t play the lottery or gamble. Playing the lotto is a great example of how human try to predict the future. People go to the store and purchase their chance at millions of dollars, thinking that the numbers they selected are the right ones. No one would pay for a ticket if they thought they were wrong. People assume that buy getting a lotto ticket there is a chance, no matter how remote that things may turn out their way. But very few of us are fortunate enough to win the lotto.

 The old cliché is true, that if stands in the middle of life . How might your life have unfolded differently? What if your parents never met? Perhaps you should have studied harder in school, or asked out so-and-so when you had the chance. Such thoughts of what might have been seem to be a common part of everyday thinking, sometimes irresistibly drawing your attention. Many of my clients struggle with what is known as counterfactual thinking, but you and I know it as a “what if?” approach to life. Your thoughts may almost seem programmed to focus on events that have never even occurred. Very often I hear, “If I had only gotten this job I’d be happier,” “if I had asked this woman out on a date life would be better,” or “if had I not gotten into that car accident I’d be in a much better spot.” People focus on how they would of liked thing to be rather then how they are. They assume that “if only this had or had not occurred” they would be happier, or at least have a greater sense of satisfaction in their lives.

 Some of us will get the things we want, and others won’t. The more interesting question is: Why do people who get what they want rarely end up as happy as they expected, while people who fail to achieve dreams rarely end up as unhappy as they feared? Why do you systematically fail to predict how happy and unhappy you will be? Why do you do this? Well its simple, predicting the future is inherently difficult. But even when you know what is going to happen, you base your estimates of your future happiness, on the person you are today. But you fail to appreciate, not only that you will be different tomorrow. That the very things you seek will change who you are. When you make choices to avoid risks that may bring you sorrow or desperately seek some symbol of success, you fail to appreciate how quickly you will absorb such pleasurable events and move on.

 People make mistakes when they try to predict what will make them happy in the future, which has been called “emotional estimates.” Anyone who has ever said “I think I’d prefer chocolate to vanilla” or “I’d rather be a lawyer than a banjo player” has made an emotional estimates and tried to predict what would make them happy. And anyone who has made an emotional estimate has found out that sometimes they are wrong. Its pretty amazing how poorly people predicted the emotional consequences of future events, both large and small. Should I get married? Have a family? Pursue a career as musician or teacher? Go out to dinner or stay home and watch a made-for-television movie? Decisions such as these, virtually all of life’s big decisions are based on predictions about how the different options will make you feel in the future.

 Foreseeing the future is one of the most appealing of all powers. Who has not dreamed of making millions by predicting which new offering on Wall Street will be the next Microsoft and whether the Red Sox or Phillies will win the World Series? Seeing into the future would bring many advantages other than fattening your wallet, such as eliminating all decision making angst. Rather than worrying about whether you are best suited for a career as a lawyer or an interior designer, whether you should marry Sam or Harry, or whether you should buy your neighbor’s 1992 Volvo, you could simply glance into your crystal ball and see how these various options would pan out. They want to know the future price of Microsoft stock so that they can make money, which they believe will increase their happiness. The pursuit of happiness is one of the most fundamental of all human motives, and if people had crystal balls in good working order, they would peer into them most often to try to achieve that goal.

 People do not have crystal balls, of course (at least not accurate ones) and thus must prognosticate as best they can, based on what they know in the present and what they have learned in the past. There is a great deal of research on how people make predictions about the future. Until recently, virtually all research on prediction has focused on people’s ability to anticipate the occurrence of future external events (e.g., “will the price of Microsoft stock go up or down?”) or their own behavior (e.g., “am I likely to get divorced in the next 10 years?”). But, a crucial form of prediction has been overlooked, namely people’s ability to forecast their own feelings. What people really want to know about the future, is what their level of happiness and well-being will be.

 Human beings possess a unique ability to engage in emotional time travel, mentally fast forwarding through time to envision how much they will love their spouse five years later or how much they will enjoy a hot fudge sundae next Thursday. Emotional time travel is not without its pitfalls, however, as recent research has documented. At the most obvious level, people may make inaccurate predictions about how they will feel in a situation because the situation unfolds differently than they expect. For example, if a vacationer imagines a week of swimming and surfing in Australia and arrives to find the beaches swarming with man-eating sharks and deadly jellyfish, her actual emotional experiences during the vacation are likely to diverge sharply from her original expectations. Yet, even if the situation people experience objectively matches the situation they imagined, people face a fundamentally different psychological situation when they experience an event than when they imagine it. The failure to recognize this basic point begets a wide variety of affective forecasting errors.

 Modern people take the ability to imagine the future for granted, but it turns out that this is one of our species’ most recently acquired abilities—no more than three million years old. The part of our brain that enables us to think about the future is one of nature’s newest inventions, so it isn’t surprising that when we try to use this new ability to imagine our futures, we make some rookie errors. Experiencing an event is fundamentally different from imagining it because once an event occurs people are generally motivated to make the best of it. Upon finding herself sharing a beach with sharks and jellyfish, for example, our traveler might find pleasure in the opportunity to observe exotic wildlife in their natural habitat, though she probably would not have foreseen her own ability to reconstrue the situation in this way. Indeed, people are extremely adept at reconstrual, rationalization, and other mental transformations that take the sting out of unwanted events, but they are often blind to these tools of the unconscious. As a result of this blindness, they often overestimate how miserable they will feel when faced with misfortune, as well as how long they will feel that way.

 Whether positive or negative, imagining an event is very different from experiencing it because people tend to imagine a specific event in isolation, whereas events are rarely experienced in a vacuum. For example, in imagining how happy he will feel on the day his first child is born, an expectant father is likely to focus on the miraculous arrival of his new baby, while forgetting that the taste of hospital food, the chatter of relatives, and the songs playing in the waiting room will serve as the background, at least temporarily distracting him from the main event. Thus, because people have a narrow, isolated focus, without regard to background distractions, they tend to overestimate their emotional reactions to both positive and negative events.

 Suppose, for example, that a person is suffering from a cold when trying to decide whether to accept an invitation to a party the following month, and her current negative feelings taint her assessment of how she will feel at the party. This has been referred to as projection bias, defined as the tendency for people to “underappreciate the effects of changes in their states, and hence falsely project their current preferences . . . onto their future preferences” people attempt to come up with an unbiased estimate of what their affective state will be in the future, but their assessment is contaminated by unique influences on their current affective state.

 Researchers found that when people shop for food to be consumed later, they are influenced by their current state of hunger. Shoppers who have not eaten for several hours think, “Surely I will want several bags of corn chips and a couple of cartons of ice cream next week,” failing to adjust for the fact that they will often be full during the week and not experiencing the same cravings.  Just as people who shop when hungry purchase too many junk foods, people who shop when they are full may purchase too few, underestimating how much they will want a bag of corn chips when watching television late the next night. In addition to failing to anticipate unique influences on their emotional reactions to an event, people often fail to anticipate the extent to which unrelated events will influence their thoughts and emotions. The pleasures and pains, joys and sufferings, which people actually experience, often fall short of what they had anticipated

 When people think about how they will feel when a future event occurs, they first must bring to mind a representation of that event. If people have experienced the event many times before (e.g., commuting to work), they can form such a representation effortlessly by recalling a prototype or exemplar of it. When people think about events that they have not experienced before, such as the birth of a child, getting married, or attending a party at the house of a new acquaintance, they need to construct a representation of what the event is likely to entail. people mistakenly imagine the event. When asked how she will feel at the birth of her first child, a woman might imagine a trouble-free, natural delivery followed by a quiet period of intimate bonding with the baby. What happens instead is 24 hours of painful labor, a Cesarean-section, and intrusive visits from in-laws armed with video cameras.

 In anticipating a coming event we have it alone in mind, and make no consideration of other occurrences When considering how their emotional lives will be influenced by a future occurrence, such as the outcome of an election or sporting event, people tend to think of their lives in a vacuum, focusing on that occurrence alone (“I’ll be thrilled for days if Finkleberry wins the election”). Events do not occur in a vacuum of course, but in the rich context of many other events in people’s lives. By neglecting to consider how much these other events will capture their attention and influence their emotions, people mistakenly estimate the impact of the event.

 There are a number of concepts used to explain these peculiar findings. The problem frequently highlighted is we have a tendency to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts and feelings in the future. For example, we set the alarm for 5 a.m. as you slide into bed at midnight with the intention of an early-morning run. On what are you basis do you make this choice of what time to get up, on your present optimistic feelings that night of course. This is certainly not how you’re feeling 5 hours later in the darkness before dawn. The consequence? You hit snooze, roll over and change your behavior to correspond with reality, your still tired. I am not thinking about how I usually feel at 5 a.m. on any given day – tired! And, when I’m tired, I’m not particularly happy. I’m basing my feelings about running tomorrow on my feelings at the moment I’m making the choice to get up early. However, at 5 a.m. when I awake to the alarm tired and unhappy to be so tired, the temptation is to give in to feel good. That is, I will now take the more preferable action, preferable because I anticipate I’ll feel better, and that is to sleep. Short term gain, but long-term consequences for my health goals.

 So this raises the question of whether these mistaken estimations are functional in some way. It does not seem functional to under/overestimate the intensity and duration of one’s negative emotional reactions. This can be especially painful when you cannot do anything to influence the outcome, which only exaggerates unnecessary worry and anger. Of course people need to prepare for uncontrollable negative events by looking for another job or working hard on applications to other colleges, but it does not seem beneficial to exaggerate how badly one will feel if an uncontrollable event happens.

 It is easy to imagine how overestimating the intensity and duration of negative outcomes can serve as motivation for people to work hard in the present to prevent these outcomes from occurring in the future. Exaggerating the intensity and duration of reactions to positive events can also serve as a motivator, leading people to work harder to obtain these outcomes. Further, there is utility in anticipating positive events, and people find substantial enjoyment exaggerating the pleasure they will experience in the future (e.g., “the concert will be a real peak experience”). Yet, sometimes people have no control over future outcomes, such as the possibility that the large corporation that is about to go bankrupt or that the college that turns you down.

So, exaggerating the impact of events, such as a job promotion might serve to increase people’s motivation to work toward it. But why should people work hard toward something that will not bring as much gratification as they think? Wouldn’t it be to people’s advantage to have a better idea of the intensity and duration of the pleasure that they would derive from different events? Consider people who are thinking of buying expensive items such as a television set or new car. Part of the decision involves a forecast of their happiness. People are willing to pay more for an item if they think it will cause lasting intense pleasure, than if they think it will make them happy for only an hour or a day. If people overestimate how much pleasure a television set or new car will bring, they are paying more for these items, than they should.

 Clearly, if people misunderstand how a situation will influence their behavior, their predictions about how they will feel in these situations, will be incorrect. For example, women were asked to predict how they would react if they were asked sexually harassing questions during a job interview and compared these predictions to the actual reactions of women who really were asked the sexually harassing questions during an interview. The forecasters’ predictions were surprisingly at odds with the experiences of the women who participated in the real interview, in part because they imagined a different situation than the one faced by the experiencers. The forecasters imagined a situation in which it would be easy to confront the interviewer and where their primary emotional reaction would be anger. In the real interview the women were suddenly faced by a confusing and surprising interaction in which their primary emotional reaction was fear. Sixty-eight percent of forecasters said they would refuse to answer at least one of the three questions, whereas every experiencer answered every question. Twenty-eight percent of the forecasters said that they would confront the interviewer or leave; none of the experiencers did so. The researchers noted that women are often unfairly blamed for failing to confront harassment, precisely because of this kind of error. People imagine a situation in which it is easy to confront a harasser, failing to appreciate that the situation will be a more complex one in which they experience intimidation, confusion, and fear.

 Clearly, errors in predicting what will make you happy interfere with the pursuit of your happiness. People often seek out things that will not increase their happiness or fervently avoid things that will not decrease their happiness. Interestingly, people may fall into these traps even when they consciously recognize what matters for their happiness, leading them to pursue goals whose fruition may produce little happiness.

 Affective forecasting errors have important implications for both physical and mental health. People may delay getting tested for serious health problems in part because they anticipate lasting misery if the test reveals unwanted results. Yet, such dire forecasts may be inaccurate. Similarly, people seem to overestimate how unhappy they would be while undergoing treatment for a serious disorder, suggesting that people may sometimes resist medical treatment because they fail to recognize how readily they will adapt to it.

Beyond interfering with one’s own health and happiness, affective forecasting errors have important interpersonal consequences. When faced with the challenge of understanding how another person feels in a given situation, people typically begin by predicting how they themselves would feel in the situation and then adjust for differences between themselves and others. Therefore, to the extent that people mispredict their own feelings, they may also misunderstand others’ feelings and their corresponding behaviors. If people fail to understand others’ emotions, then the behaviors corresponding to these unpredicted emotions are likely to seem inappropriate and may be viewed as evidence of undesirable personality traits.

 People tend to make extreme exaggerated predictions about their emotional responses to an upcoming event because they neglect consideration of the circumstances. Therefore, simply asking people to think about these background events and activities can reduce the extremity of their forecasts. For example, college football fans made more restrained predictions about how they would feel in the days following a win or loss by their team, when they first described the other activities they would be engaged in during that time.

 Your predictions may be improved not only by drawing your attention to background events, but also by drawing your attention to features of the anticipated event or outcome, which you may typically overlook. This is necessary because of the isolations effect. The isolation effect occurs when people are faced with a set of options, and they typically isolate certain features that make each option different, while neglecting the features that are shared or similar in all the options. For example, in looking at colleges, students may focus on a few features that differentiate the colleges (e.g., location) while paying little attention to their many shared features (e.g., size, extracurriculars).  Asking people to think about features that are similar or shared across outcomes can lead them to place more attention on such features, which are equally important for actual happiness.

 The true power of the mind is always available. It is the hidden resource that can provide lifesaving insights to people in danger, calming realizations to people in despair, career saving insights to people in fear of failure, world changing ideas to people who are inventors or discoverers. What does it take produce quality thinking? First, it requires you to accept that it is without a doubt in the capacity of all humanity to think clearly, intuitively, in a wise and responsive way, learning about life from moment to moment.

 The most compelling evidence of this is any conversation with any child; young children consistently and quite unaffectedly think this way. We make light of it with books and programs like “Kids Say the Darndest Things”, Art Linkletter’s popular feature of the 1950’s and ‘60’s. But such compilations provide significant proof that it is universally intrinsic to humanity to generate original ideas on the basis of nothing. And when one listens carefully to children, one hears the consistent tendency towards generalization towards seeing patterns and meaning more profound than the facts or literal words at hand.

 Second, it takes the recognition that it is a direction. Thinking about your thinking excludes the natural flow of ideas because it darkens the windows of “I wonder…” with the detritus of “I already know…” While a person is in the state of already knowing, curiosity is held at bay. Questions that would occur naturally in a state of wonder have no place in that other realm and do not come to mind. For example, if I am listening to a political speech and my mind is fully occupied with cataloging that with which I agree, that with which I disagree and that which I consider stupid so I can keep score, I will not hear “new” ideas. Someone sitting next to me listening to see what can be learned and understood from the speaker might have an insight about the solution to a political problem that transcends the speaker’s ideas, but was born of the interaction between psychological readiness to learn and ideas being expressed. I would walk away with my disgust of politics reaffirmed by experience; the other person would walk away with a great idea and a sense of hopefulness that transcended politics.

 Third, it takes the faith that, regardless of how discouraged or habitually overwrought a person might be, looking in that direction will dissolve the thinking that fed the feelings of negativity and stress. As soon as the mind is at rest, the flow of responsive, common sense thinking resumes and will continue unabated until it is once more interrupted by a deliberately orchestrated change in mental direction. The ability to generalize is nothing more than the ability to sustain faith in the flow of ideas long enough for wisdom to deepen. The habit of “pouncing on” and doing something with the first good idea that comes to mind is a lack of patience and a lack of experience with allowing ideas to evolve, to blossom to their own fullness.

 Quality thinking involves the ability to see beyond details and differences to generalized meaning, looking to understand the source and nature of thought itself. It is as helpful to a stressed out homeless drug abuser as it is to a pumped up, arrogant business person as it is to a worried single mother as it is to an hallucinating psychotic. Rather than emphasizing differences and details, quality thinking points all people toward their hardwired capacity to think anew, to glean an understanding of life itself, forming and reforming through the flow of intelligent thought in a calm and unfettered mind.