Focalism: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting

The durability bias, the tendency to overpredict the duration of affective reactions to future events, may be due in part to focalism, whereby people focus too much on the event in question and not enough on the consequences of other future events. If so, asking people to think about other future ac tivities should reduce the durability bias. In Studies 1-3, college footbal l fans were less likely to overpredict how long the outcome of a football g ame would influence their happiness if they first thought about how much ti me they would spend on other future activities. Studies 4 and 5 ruled out a lternative explanations and found evidence for a distraction interpretation , that people who think about future events moderate their forecasts becaus e they believe that these events will reduce thinking about the focal event . The authors discuss the implications of focalism for other literatures, s uch as the planning fallacy.