How ‘Prospection’ Causes You to Make Poor Decisions
You can probably imagine the thrill and excitement when your favorite sports team wins and you’re cheering them from the stands although they’ve never won before. Equally, you know how you’ll feel when you get into your number one choice college or land your dream job, or even the emotions you’ll feel on your wedding day.
You know this because you’ve played these situations over and over in your mind. You know the people who’ll be there and the clothes you’ll be wearing as if it were a memory.
Psychologists call this act of feeling future events even before they have happened to us — Prospection.
What is Prospection?
In psychology, Prospection is the generation and evaluation of mental representation of possible futures. This may include planning, prediction, hypothetical scenarios, daydreaming, and evaluative assessment of possible future events.
Daniel Gilbert, a renowned psychologist, described this in simpler terms in his novel Stumbling on Happiness. He called it the act of looking forward in time or considering the future.
In their 2007 journal, Gilbert and Wilson say that we know winning a lottery would be more enjoyable than becoming paraplegic. It is not because they’ve happened to us in the past but because we can sit in the comfort of our room, close our eyes, imagine both events and pre-experience or pre-feel them right here and now.
You can, at this very moment, experience the day when you’d finally pay off your debt and feel free for the first time in a very long time. And you already know how daunting it is to only get a thought of something terrible happening to a loved one.
Reminisce the future, as they say.
What is the problem?
Prospection can be beneficial when you’re setting a goal for yourself. It helps people get motivated when they can feel the value that achieving those goals will give them. The value can be money or just the satisfaction of knowledge itself.
As Victoria Hekking puts it, it is the anticipation of a better future, a hope, that makes people take the step.
But Gilbert and Wilson argue that Prospection can lead us to draw conclusions about the future that aren’t always right. This is because our emotions at the moment affect our decision.
Think of a couple who are currently unmarried and have no plan for it soon. They decide to share a mortgage and buy a condo for themselves. As Kevin O’Leary would say, what happens if things go south and turn ugly between them. It happens all the time, but they did not think of it at the time.
Their emotion — in this case, love — blinds them.
The two researchers of behavioral economics discuss a number of factors that prevent us from predicting the future correctly.
You are a product of your past
Memories are the building blocks of simulations. We imagine future events by connecting them to a memory that isn’t always accurate.
You can have a driving experience of over ten years before you meet your first accident. You’re more likely to think about your accident the next time you hold the wheel.
People tend to remember their worst experience rather than their typical experience, which leads them to overestimate the adverse effects in their simulation of a similar event.
We only remember our worst, best and recent experiences. This is why we feel shit about all our exams when only the last one went poorly.
Undermining non-essential details
Many of my friends prefer books over their movie counterparts. And I see this debate every few months over the internet.
The argument is that the books are more descriptive of the environment and characters when compared to their movies.
A book is made of hundreds of seemingly non-essential details compared to the bigger picture of the plot, but they are essential in isolation. They help you understand the characters better than the costume and expressions in movies.
It is the same case when we prospect future events. Since memories are the building blocks of our simulations, we only imagine the essential details of the event. This introduces bias into our decisions, and we overestimate our feelings.
The good becomes better while the bad becomes worse.
Feelings — sad or happy — will eventually pass
People at Wall Street thought that the booming housing market will never fall. They thought the music will go on forever, and with it will their dance. Lights went off, the battery on their iPods died, and the music eventually stopped.
People feel they won’t ever be able to get over their break-ups and will sulk for the rest of their lives. These same people grow to become sublime individuals, doing things they never thought they would.
We know from our experiences that these emotions will eventually pass.
Gilbert and Wilson argue that people change and adapt to circumstances but often fail to appreciate their ability to do so.
We lose the context
We predict our future based on our present emotional state, which can be influenced by a hundred different factors. The alarm didn’t go off, the water in the shower was cold, or you spilled coffee all over your clothes.
To correctly predict a future feeling, you need to have the same context as the present when the event actually happens.
And indeed, when people are specifically encouraged to consider these contextual factors, their predictions become more accurate.
Conclusion
People are natural prospectors. We look at the world as it is right now and predict the future by combining it with our experiences.
The amalgamation leads us to draw conclusions and make decisions that aren’t always right. This makes the act of decision-making an inherently difficult task.
Prospection is a way in which the brain discovers what it already knows. We call upon our ancestral gods when we simulate an event. This is why older people are more accurate than younger people when predicting their feelings.
This brings us to the conclusion that most people experience similar things. It will help us make better decisions if we can recognize these barriers and spend time to gain advice and insights from people who’ve been there and done that.
