Why are we so bad at predicting what will make us happy? (Pt.2)

Business Insider:

I previously posted about why we’re awful at predicting what will make us happy: we’re lousy at remembering our predictions so we don’t learn how to correct our errors.

There are some others reasons:

When you’re emotional, you’re a different person. That’s not an excuse but there is science to back it up. Calm people were terrible at predicting how moral they would be once emotional:

Can people accurately predict how they will act in a moral dilemma? Our research suggests that in some situations, they cannot, and that emotions play a pivotal role in this dissociation between behavior and forecasting. In the current experiment, individuals in a moral action condition cheated significantly less on a math task than participants in a forecasting condition predicted they themselves would cheat. Furthermore, we found that participants in the action condition displayed significantly more physiological arousal, as measured by preejection period, skin conductance response (SCR), and respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA), and that the underestimation effect was mediated by SCR and RSA together. This research suggests that the affective arousal present during real-life moral dilemmas may not be fully engaged during moral forecasting, and that this may account for the moral forecasting errors that individuals make. This research has the potential to inform past work in the field of moral psychology, which has largely ignored actual behavior.

Read the whole stories: Business Insider