Disappointment and the Future

Beyon Miloyan and Thomas Suddendorf, ‘Feelings of the Future’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 19 (2015), 196-200.

I like it when cognitive scientists study distinctive qualities of our minds, then identify problems with the ways they work, and then suggest reasons why these problems may in fact be the result of evolution, affording advantages in one way or another. Miloyan and Suddendorf are interested in ‘affective forecasting’, our ability to predict how we will feel under future conditions. Experiments suggest that we are liable to overestimate the intensity and duration of emotional consequences. This is ‘impact bias’. The paper suggests ways in which this inbuilt overestimation may offer adaptive advantages: it may help motivate goal-oriented actions (now is what matters; later can take care of itself), and it may help motivate cooperative activity.
      I found this a very thought-provoking essay. One of its key examples was a large experiment on newlyweds. As Miloyan and Suddendorf put it, ‘newlywed spouses typically predict increases in relationship satisfaction over time and yet experience satisfaction declines’. Strikingly, ‘those who predict greater increases in satisfaction experience steeper declines’. In the authors worry that this latter point means that those most at risk of failing marriages may be less likely to seek help early on. It’s rather a sad read, actually.

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I wondered whether some of the key terms in the Miloyan and Suddendorf survey were all that stable. ‘Impact bias’ seems simple enough but when an emotion is specified – ‘satisfaction’, ‘happiness’ – it becomes a complex thing, dependent on a variety of factors. I wondered whether it was actually part of their point, or not, that the future predicted and the outcome experienced seem to be very different things. The affective forecast imagines a scenario but it’s really oriented towards present action – I’m sure that at least is part of their point. When the imagined time comes around, it’s a different present.
      No wonder, perhaps, that Shakespeare’s comedies end with newlywed optimism. Even if we have to allow for the social and cultural differences between then and now as they pertain to expectations of marriage, there is some overlap of interests. The emphatic belief that marriage promises happiness causes a set of committing, irrational, hasty, but mostly cheering actions. We never get to find out how badly the characters will be served by their choices. The Miloyan and Suddendorf article doesn’t only suggest that Shakespeare’s comedies are sensibly curtailed at the most optimistic point. It also suggests that ‘impact bias’ makes the world go round – that social change, relationships and families, progress in its most basic form, forwardness itself, rely on hard-wired, loveable, necessary, possibly doomed optimism. Shakespeare’s marriage comedies are built around that knowledge.
      As You Like It; exactly so, in the now. All’s Well That Ends Well; the play knows that the positioning of an ‘end’, where you stop recording, makes a big difference:

BERTRAM
If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly,
I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.
HELENA
If it appear not plain and prove untrue,
Deadly divorce step between me and you!

Lavner et al. went back after four years to see what the newlywed optimism had turned into. Better to leave Helena and Bertram at the ‘if’ stage, and let the optimistic forecast affect the present, which is what it is supposed to do.

Justin A. Lavner, Benjamin R. Karney, and Thomas R. Bradbury, ‘Newlyweds’ Optimistic Forecasts of Their Marriage: For Better or for Worse’, Journal of Family Psychology, 27 (2013), 531-40.
E-mail me at rtrl100[at]cam.ac.uk

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