Impact Bias

Danielle Baptiste

Emotions provide a motive that determines our actions and outcomes. People have the ability to over analyze their future outcomes.  Professors Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson have done studies to determine whether or not people have an impact bias. Impact bias is term Professors Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson use when people over analyze their future outcomes. What is impact bias? Why does impact bias occur? Does society play a role in our impact bias?

 According to Professors Gilbert and Wilson, the term impact bias means the tendency for people to over estimate the length or the intensity of future feeling states.  For example, pretend a person bought you, your dream home. This is exactly what you wanted and you get a feeling of over whelming joy. You think this feeling of joy will last a life time. In reality, this feeling will not last that long. People think that once they received what they always wanted, a goal was accomplished. Since you have accomplished this goal you want to celebrate it, right? This feeling is normal. People fail to realize that the celebration feeling will end and then what? The answer to this is anything that is new can become old. You will find yourself wanting something else. Your dream house is what u wanted but it’s not the only factor that can give you this over whelming joy. You can’t think that since your house didn’t give you pleasure for the amount of time you wanted, that it wasn’t what u wanted. You were wrong about the amount of time you would feel happy. The level of happiness decreased over time. The house made you happy but now you want something else. The same behavior occurs when a disaster happens. People seem to think it will take longer to recover emotionally than it naturally does. I believe that people use this as a defense mechanism, so they can prepare for the worst outcome.

 The reasons impact bias occur is focalism.  Focalism is when people focus too much on the target event ignoring certain activities that may later occupy their attention. It will impact their emotional state. People can naturally rationalize what happens to them. When something bad happens, your first reaction is to feel unhappy. As time goes by, a person will find in depth reasons as to why this happened to them. The person will start to feel better about the situation. For example, pretend you are extremely angry. You have never been this anger in your life. Someone you know comes to you and says “your not acting like yourself, go take a walk and cool off”. The reason why this is excellent advice is because you will calm down and you will realize that you don’t want to be that angry. You don’t want to be that person who scares off people with your anger. You will be glad that you didn’t hurt anything or anyone. The mind operates better in a normal state.

 I believe society plays a role in a person’s impact bias.  When a child enjoys school at a young age they will grow out of it. I disagree because when we become older, we get this mentality that when a person enjoys school they aren’t cool. This also occurs in the movies we watch. The person who receives excellent grades in school are considered a nerd and social outcast. A child does not want to be in this situation, so they act like school is boring. The child is going to think that the outcome of enjoying school is going to put them in the category of being a “nerd”. This is how society has influenced some children.

Emotions provide a motive that determines our actions and outcomes. Impact bias is prediction on the amount of time the emotion will last. Society can be a factor on how a person will predict. Everyone is guilty of doing this activity. I find it amazing that Professors Dan Gilbert and Tim Wilson have studied this activity called impact bias.