People often overestimate the impact future events will have on their happiness. People may also show a retrospective impact bias, overestimating the impact of past events on their happiness, explaining why they do not learn from experience and correct their forecasts. We found such a bias for positive events; e.g., supporters of George Bush overestimated how happy they had been when the U. S. presidential election was determined. For negative events, people's recall was related to how much they were still rationalizing the outcome. Gore supporters rationalized the election by changing their views of the candidates. Four months later their positive view of Gore had returned, and they overestimated how unhappy they had been. In Study 2, poor performers on a test rationalized their performance by downplaying the test's validity. Two weeks later they continued to rationalize, and recalled accurately that they had not been very upset by their performance.

Do people learn from experience that emotional reactions to events are often short-lived? Two studies indicate that it depends on whether the events are positive or negative. People. who received positive or negative feedback on a test were not as happy or unhappy as they would have predicted. People in the positive feedback condition did not learn from this experience when making predictions about their reactions to future Positive events. People in the negative feedback condition moderated their predictions about their reactions to future negative events, but this may not have been a result of learning. Rather participants denigrated the test as a way of making themselves feel better and, when predicting future reactions, brought to mind this reconstrual of the test and inferred that doing poorly on it again would not make them very unhappy. Experience with a negative event (but not with a positive event) may improve the accuracy of one's affective forecasts, but the extent to which people learn from their affective forecasting errors may be limited.

Do people learn from experience that emotional reactions to events are often short-lived? Two studies indicate that it depends on whether the events are positive or negative. People who received positive or negative feedback on a test were not as happy or unhappy as they would have predicted. People in the positive feedback condition did not learn from this experience when making predictions about their reactions to future positive events. People in the negative feedback condition moderated their predictions about their reactions to future negative events, but this may not have been a result of learning. Rather, participants denigrated the test as a way of making themselves feel better and, when predicting future reactions, brought to mind this reconstrual of the test and inferred that doing poorly on it again would not make them very unhappy. Experience with a negative event (but not with a positive event) may improve the accuracy of one's affective forecasts, but the extent to which people learn from their affective forecasting errors may be limited. " I'll be elated for days if we beat the Rams, " a sports fan thinks, even though he or she should know better. Sporting events typically do not have long-lasting effects on people's happiness. Wilson, Wheatley, Meyers, Gilbert, and Axsom (2000), for example, assessed college football fans' happiness 1 to 3 days after their favorite teams won or lost a game and found that the outcomes of the games had no detectable effect on their happiness; yet, the fans predicted that the outcome of the games would influence their happiness for several days. This durability bias—the tendency to overestimate the duration of one's emotional reactions to future events— has been found in a variety of settings with a variety of Curiously, it occurs in domains in which people have considerable past experience. Wilson et al.'s (2000) participants had watched many football games, and yet they overpredicted the impact of future ones on their happiness. Similarly, people expect new television sets, upgraded computers, and fancy cars to cause lasting pleasure when their previous wide-screen televisions, power notebooks, and luxury sedans did not. The purpose of the present studies was to investigate why people fail to generalize from their past experiences when making affective forecasts and the conditions under which they will generalize, at least to some extent. 1 On the face of it, it seems easy to learn from past …