HOW YOU SEE YOURSELFpredictions based on a friend’s experience were far more accurate. It
seems that by finding out how someone similar to ourselves enjoyed a
given experience we can bypass the shortcomings in our own affective
forecasting.
There’s one catch here, which you might have seen coming: people
nearly always think they know better themselves. At the end of Gilbert’s
study, the majority of the women, even those who’d just experienced
first-hand how useless the profile information about the man had been,
still said they’d prefer to have personal information about a future
potential date rather than feedback about another woman’s experience.
In other words, Gilbert says, when it comes to predicting our future
enjoyment, we find it difficult to believe that a friend’s experience could
possibly be more insightful than our own best guess.
Let’s return one last time to that visit to our grumpy aunt. We’ve hope-
fully explained the exaggerated sense of dread as the visit approaches,
but what about our decision to plan the visit in the first place? Decision
making will be covered in more detail later in the book (Chapter 5), but
in the meantime, an article published by psychologist Paul Bloom in
2008, entitled “First Person Plural” may shed some light on this issue.
According to Bloom: “Many researchers now believe, to varying degrees,
that each of us is a community of competing selves, with the happiness
of one often causing the misery of another.”
Bloom provides some familiar examples, such as the you that rises in
the morning cursing the you of the previous night who decided not to
bother to set up the coffee machine. Or the cunning you who buys an
alarm clock that jumps about so that the sleepy you of the mornings will
have to get out of bed to turn it off. When it comes to your aunt there is
a dutiful you, who finds it rewarding to be the kind of person who takes
time out to see their relatives. The hedonist you might not be too happy
about this when the weekend arrives, but then if you always heeded the
calls of your inner hedonist you’d probably never go to work or put the
rubbish out. So, when you find yourself in an unwelcome situation of your
own making, remember that community of competing selves, and console
yourself that one of you might well be finding the experience rewarding.