Focalism

Focalism

When people attempt to predict their affective reactions to a particular event, they naturally focus on that event to the exclusion of others. So, for example, when a mother is asked to imagine how she would feel 7 years after the death of her youngest child, she is likely to focus exclusively on that tragedy and fail to consider the many other events that will inevitably unfold over that time period, capture her attention, require her participation, and hence influence her general affective state. Indeed, it would be truly perverse for a mother to pause and consider how much this sort of heartache might be assuaged by her other child’s portrayal of the dancing banana in the school play, an important new project at work, or the taste of an especially gooey caramel on a cloudless summer day. But the fact of the matter is that trauma does not take place in a vacuum: Life goes on, and nonfocal events do happen and do have affective consequences. As such, perverse or not, accurate affective forecasts must somehow take those consequences into account. Because nonfocal events are likely to absorb attention and thus neutralize affective responses to focal events (Erber & Tesser, 1992), the failure to consider them should generally cause people to overestimate the duration of their affective responses (Wilson, Wheatley, Meyers, Gilbert, & Axsom, 1998). (We should note that Schkade and Kahneman, 1997, and Loewenstein and Schkade, in press, independently developed a very similar analysis of a phenomenon they call the focusing illusion.)

The authors treat focalism as one of several possible contributors to durability bias and call for empirical analysis of those mechanisms (see Gilbert & Wilson, 2000).