Election Expectations

People are also thrown off by what psychologists call the "durability bias." That's just a jargony way of saying that, when we have an emotional experience, we automatically assume that the emotion—excitement, say—will continue at the same level of intensity for the foreseeable future. It's irrational, but apparently the brain is not wired to imagine the gradual dissipation of emotion over time: slightly less excitement tomorrow, even less the next day and so forth.

The fact is most people's emotions, good and bad, gradually head back toward a preset emotional baseline, but it's very difficult to see that when you're in a peak experience. Watching the crowds on U Street, the farthest thing from my mind was the notion that all this wonder would evaporate. We're not wired for cynicism.

So we're clever enough to know the future is coming, but not nearly clever enough to accurately project ourselves into it. And that leads to unrealistic expectations. This distortion is compounded by another deep-wired cognitive tendency—the tendency to view events in a vacuum, without any context. Think about election night again. In order to realistically project ourselves into the future, to view the Democratic victory in some kind of perspective, we would have to say something like this to ourselves: this is an amazing event, unprecedented in history, but tomorrow I have to revise my résumé because work isn't going so well, plus my kid may be coming down with the flu, and my old Saab's transmission is likely to give out, and on and on. In other words, there is a lot going on in our lives, but the brain can only do so much, and right now the election is pretty much eclipsing all the other stuff. But all that other stuff will creep back into focus over the days and weeks and months ahead. And so we get the inevitable letdown.

But is it inevitable? Is there anything we can do to avoid these cognitive pitfalls? Well, perhaps. Gilbert and Wilson and colleagues did a series of experiments a while back that offer some hope. They studied college students at the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech, just before and after a big football game between these longtime rivals. They asked them to predict how happy (or sad) a victory (or loss) would make them in the future, and then they actually measured the volunteers' sense of well being later on. But here's the twist. They had some of the students keep a prospective "diary" before the game. That is, they projected themselves into the future and wrote down everything that they imagined they would be doing day to day: studying, partying with friends, writing papers, and so forth. They found that those who did this—who basically put the prospect of a depressing loss (or joyful victory) into the perspective of daily life—had much more realistic expectations for their future happiness.

Now, we don't have to actually write such diaries. But apparently, with some mental work, we are capable of keeping peak experiences in proper perspective. This does not mean we shouldn't savor the vivid emotional memories of election night. I know I'm not ready to let go of that U Street image of kids ushering in this new era. But it is just that, a peak experience, the beginning of a long slog ahead.

Wray Herbert writes the We're Only Human blog at www.psychologicalscience.org/onlyhuman

© 2008