WORD · brick

projection-bias

The mind forecasts tomorrow's feelings from today's — and the forecast is most wrong where the future has least to offer.

Projection bias is the tendency to project one's current affective state onto future predictions, overestimating how much future experience will resemble current feeling. In affective forecasting, people overestimate future enjoyment most where the actual experience has least to offer — the gap between predicted and experienced utility is widest where the prediction was made without the information the experience later delivers. The willingness-persistence-gap room used it to predict that the gap between immediate willingness and delayed persistence opens widest for absent-value tasks, and the inverted-diagnostic room used it to predict that a delayed informational reveal narrows the gap for hidden-value tasks (the forecast updates) while leaving absent-value gaps wide (there was nothing to learn).

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