Writ­ten by, among oth­ers, Daniel Gilbert (author of Stum­bling on Hap­pi­ness), an arti­cle in Sci­ence looks at how bad we are at judg­ing our reac­tions to var­i­ous future events (closed access article).

In two exper­i­ments, par­tic­i­pants more accu­rately pre­dicted their affec­tive reac­tions to a future event when they knew how a neigh­bor in their social net­work had reacted to it than when they knew about the event itself. Women made more accu­rate pre­dic­tions about how much they would enjoy a date with a man when they knew how much another woman in their social net­work enjoyed dat­ing the man than when they read the man’s per­sonal pro­file and saw his pho­to­graph. Men and women made more accu­rate pre­dic­tions about how they would feel after being eval­u­ated by a peer when they knew how another per­son in their social net­work had felt after being eval­u­ated than when they pre­viewed the eval­u­a­tion itself. Although sur­ro­ga­tion trumped sim­u­la­tion, both par­tic­i­pants and inde­pen­dent judges had pre­cisely the oppo­site intu­ition. By a wide mar­gin, they believed that sim­u­la­tion was more likely than sur­ro­ga­tion to pro­duce accu­rate affec­tive forecasts.

Robin Han­son gives his typ­i­cally learned opin­ion on the paper:

Peo­ple often won­der what it will be like for them to be old, or mar­ried, or with a suc­cess­ful career, etc.  They usu­ally con­clude they just can’t know, and must wait and see.  Yet all around them are other folks who are old, mar­ried, etc. — why not just accept those expe­ri­ences as a good pre­dic­tions of such futures?

This research shows that we should do exactly that, as we’re not as dif­fer­ent as we would like to think.