“네, 선풍기를 오래 쐬면 머리가 아파서 여러 브랜드와 여러 가격대의 선풍기를 테스트 하고 있었는데, 자연풍을 경험하게 해준다는 선풍기를 발견했어요. 가격이 55만원으로 스탠드형 선풍기 평균 가격보다 10배 가까이 비쌌습니다. 주변 사람들은 실외기가 포함된 에어컨이 50만원인데 선풍기 회사에서 사기를 친거 아니냐고 말했지만, 저는 머리가 아프지 않은 바람을 경험한다면 55만원은 투자할 수 있다고 생각했어요.”
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 activities should reduce the durability bias. In Studies 1–3, college football fans were less likely to overpredict how long the outcome of a football game would influence their happiness if they first thought about how much time they would spend on other future activities. Studies 4 and 5 ruled out alternative explanations and found evidence for a distraction interpretation, that people who think about future events moderate their forecasts because they believe that these events will reduce thinking about the focal event. The authors discuss the implications of focalism for other literatures, such as the planning fallacy.
Large samples of students in the Midwest and in Southern California rated satisfaction with life overall as well as with various aspects of life, for either themselves or someone similar to themselves in one of the two regions. Self-reported overall life satisfaction was the same in both regions, but participants who rated a similar other expected Californians to be more satisfied than Midwesterners. Climate-related aspects were rated as more important for someone living in another region than for someone in one’s own region. Mediation analyses showed that satisfaction with climate and with cultural opportunities accounted for the higher overall life satisfaction predicted for Californians. Judgments of life satisfaction in a different location are susceptible to a focusing illusion: Easily observed and distinctive differences between locations are given more weight in such judgments than they will have in reality.
