Abstract

Through a number of studies recently published in the psychology literature, T.D. Wilson, D.T. Gilbert, and others have demonstrated that our judgments about what our future mental states will be are contaminated by various distortions. Their studies distinguish a variety of different distortions, but they refer to them all with the generic term “affective forecasting.” The findings of their studies on normal volunteers are remarkably robust and, therefore, demonstrate that we are all vulnerable to the distortions of affective forecasting. a