Election Expectations

On election night, there was a spontaneous outpouring of young celebrants, black and white, into Washington D.C.'s U Street corridor. U Street, home to the famed Lincoln Theatre and Ben's Chili Bowl, was once the center of African-American culture in D.C., until it was burned and gutted by the race riots of the '60s. It has taken decades for this historic neighborhood to recover from those divisive times, so to see it throbbing with youthful hope was poignant and exhilarating.

Scenes like that were played out all over the country. But a week later, it's fair to ask ourselves, how are we going to carry that excitement and goodwill into the future? Is it possible to sustain it, or are we just setting ourselves up for disappointment with our high expectations?

Psychologists are very interested in how the mind processes events like this historic election, and how it turns them into hope and expectation—or regret and disappointment. How powerfully do our experiences today shape our emotions of tomorrow? In short, what predicts future happiness?

Researchers call this emotional forecasting. Humans are arguably the only animals capable of imagining what doesn't already exist, conjuring up future scenarios. That's a trait of our highly evolved brains, but evolution apparently stopped short—because we're not all that talented at predicting our own state of mind. Indeed, study after study has shown that we're usually way off the mark with our predictions. We believe that winning the lottery will make us blissful, and it rarely does. We think being jilted will devastate us, yet we almost always bounce back.

Why are we so bad at this? A growing cadre of psychologists—Dan Gilbert of Harvard, Timothy Wilson of Virginia, and others—have been exploring the cognitive machinery of emotional forecasting—and its failures. Their studies point to a few possible reasons for our failures of imagination.

One major stumbling block is our brain's natural tendency to compare events. For example, these psychologists ran a simple experiment in which they had volunteers contemplate a plate of potato chips. For some, there was a plate of sardines sitting nearby, while for others there was a fine Swiss chocolate. Those who were sitting near the sardines predicted that the chips would taste much better than did those eyeing the chocolate; they were mentally comparing the chips to fish or chocolate. But in fact, when they actually ate the chips, there was no difference in their enjoyment. They "mis-wanted" the chips because of a faulty comparison. Right now, a lot of Obama loyalists may be thinking about the past eight years as a plate of sardines, and falsely interpreting that as a guarantee of something delicious to come.