This is the diatribe I unleashed upon my professor after he assigned me a bull**** topic for my paper. Some of you might get another laugh out of it.
Psychology 202
(Scientific Foundations of Psychology)
Quite simply put, affective forecasting is the ability of a person to predict ones affect, or emotions, regarding a particular event. The theory goes that most of the other predictions that people make regarding the future- be they economic, social, or otherwise- are simply a form of surrogate for whether they will have continue to have or, in some cases, a state of satisfactory emotional wellbeing. There has been no shortage of research on the topic in recent years, but it honestly seems that the more written on the subject, the less is actually being said. The question that should be asked, the elephant in the living room if you will, is whether any of this actually amounts to anything more than academic hair splitting over a topic so simplistic that it barely warrants further study. Those of us on the outside looking in are likely to answer with a resounding yes, but there are apparently a number of researchers who seem to have dedicated their academic careers around repeatedly swatting scientific flies with a very large, and no doubt expensive, series of research hammers.
This is demonstrated by the rote and thoroughly unoriginal lines along which researchers into this field split the different subgroups of affective forecasting (Wilson & Gilbert, 2003):
- valence, which is simply whether the person believes they will experience positive versus negative emotions related to a given outcome
- identification of specific emotions they expect to experience, which many people tend to be less accurate regarding.
- prediction of intensity of emotions
- prediction of duration of emotions
A good example, although not a great one of the pedantic nature of this research is the work regarding the effects of temporal distance on forecasting and emotional modeling, which seems more the caliber of a project that one would expect from a community college student rather than three doctoral level researchers.(Liberman, Sagristano, & Trope, 2002). They found that, not surprisingly to anyone with supratentorial function, their subjects had a more schematic and less concrete prediction for their emotion to distant events than to ones occurring sooner.
The article is fairly weak in actually stating anything that is worthy of publication and relies exceedingly heavily upon assumptions drawn by others in previous papers, as evidenced by the article reading more like a literature review than an actual research paper. They also made a rather confusing decision to include three research projects, all only marginally related, into this one paper. I can only surmise this was because none of the projects in and of themselves yielded sufficient results to constitute a least publishable unit.
The overly simplistic nature of the research projects themselves is another strike against this paper. The first of the three was simple categorization based upon a proposed timeline for three separate events, which yielded broader categorization as the date of the event became more distant. The second was simply listing events that would happen on an imaginary good day and then rating them on a scale from good to neutral to bad. Something similar was also done with an imaginary bad day. The results showed that increasing time prior to an event yielded less specific and more classical responses from the subjects. The final study was looking at self-rated efficacy on various activities of daily living and basically the findings were, as expected, that the subjects did not invest as much thought or evaluation in these tasks when they were more disparate temporally.
If one were to be fully honest, this trio of projects would probably best been presented as a poster rather than wasting paper for the publication. Perhaps they were trying to demonstrate again the findings of others mentioned in their three-page discourse on the background of this topic that affective forecasting is based largely on how a subject approaches an event. If this was their goal, I am sad to report it was successful and the redundancy of this paper carries on with another further seven pages with reiterations of things that I had realized in elementary school. Any attempt at analyzing this article for intellectual value, especially from a pragmatic standpoint such as mine, would be fruitless as the research- like much on this topic- does not seem to offer much in the way of useful revelations for any person who does not qualify for an ICD-9 code for mental ******ation.
The next article I found on the subject, while no more useful, was at least more concisely written. (Gilbert & Ebert, 2002) The first sentence of the abstract made me lose a modicum of respect for Ivy League professors (the authors are from Harvard and MIT respectively) as apparently not even those hallowed institutions tend to hold their faculty to anything beyond quantity over quality when it comes to research. It is perhaps this lack of preemptive quality control that necessitates the existence of a class designed to convince people that psychology is not the pot-smoking little brother of the older sciences, but that is a topic for another discussion. While I understand that it is the normal behavior of psychological researchers to overanalyze the hell out of things and I agree that repetition is a good thing, there comes a point where theorizing and, more importantly, publishing those theories needs to take a backseat to basic common sense.
It is worth noting that Gilbert and Ebert at least had the presence of mind to effectively indicate that people are willing to lie to, mislead, bull**** themselves and everyone around them as well as do whatever else they think is necessary to make themselves feel better about an outcome. However, this one bright spot in an otherwise tedious literature review was tempered when yet another title for something has already been named numerous things by numerous researchers was presented. The mentioning of a psychological immune system is yet another example of why many people tend to think psychology a rather weird field full of people who really all seem to be pulling in different directions.
Rather than giving something already well described a new title, perhaps the authors should have argued for everyone choosing one that was already in existence and standardizing the terminology. I would like to present my own theory for this, although I have only questionable amounts of evidence to support it this more than should be sufficient to earn me a spot amongst the rest of theories open for conjecture in this field. I call it R_____________s theory of tenure disimpaction. Effectively it involves pulling research papers out of ones rectum and sigmoid colon in an attempt to earn tenure as rapidly as possible. However, further research on the matter is necessary before it can be fully teased apart from the more commonly known publish or perish theory of tenure achievement.
Their actual projects involved using college students and simply either giving them the option to change their minds over a period of several days regarding a selection from a series of items, or not allowing them this liberty. There were comparisons between each group and not surprisingly, the group given the option to swap out their choice for something else was happier.
The final article I reviewed was so poorly written and abysmally conceived that I feel the urge to print it out, wipe myself with it and mail it to the authors just to make a point.(Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998) It is simply a masturbatory exercise on their part to cement the stance that adding a new name (the one previously mentioned) to a previously well-described phenomenon makes it somehow a viable research topic or even lends credence to an overzealous exaggeration of a normal coping mechanism. They looked at several small projects where, in their opinion people were simply not aware that the alleged psychological immune system would or would not protect them because people tended to overshoot on their estimates of how long their emotional response to a given scenario would last. The findings they report are nothing beyond what anyone who has taken, and managed to stay awake during, general psychology would expect given the well-documented and widely recognized capacity of the human mind to deal with almost anything. The results were certainly not worthy of a twenty-two page treatise that deprived me of twenty minutes of my life I will never get back.
If one were to look at these articles solely from the point of the research methods used, they are quite well done, but that is not to say that these studies (from any of the papers) have any real value beyond being a bullet on someones curriculum vitae. The lack of insight beyond what existed prior to their publication leads one to question why, if there is still so much left to learn on important and directly consequential matters regarding human cognition, memory, social interaction, and other psychological matters, are those who have the education and (one would expect) intelligence to do such research allowed to march in the academic and scientific equivalent of mark time while consuming valuable funding. This is truly sad, not only for the field as a whole, for even the small group of misguided individuals who insist upon pursuing such a pointless and vapid topic as this that these three papers are the best available out of the twenty-five or more that I found on the topic. All that is revealed by all of these articles is a group of researchers, behaving like pithed dogs, happy to fritter away their days endlessly chasing their own and each others tails.
Gilbert, D. T., & Ebert, J. E. J. (2002). Decisions and revisions: the affective forecasting of changeable outcomes.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(4), 503-514.
Gilbert, D. T., Pinel, E. C., Wilson, T. D., Blumberg, S. J., & Wheatley, T. P. (1998). Immune neglect: a source of durability bias in affective forecasting.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75(3), 617-638.
Liberman, N., Sagristano, M. D., & Trope, Y. (2002). The effect of temporal distance on level of mental construal.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 38, 523-534.
Wilson, T. D., & Gilbert, D. T. (2003). Affective Forecasting. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.),
Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 35, pp. 352-411). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.