The Doomsayer’s Delight and Why It Isn’t All That Delightful

An age-old question in the ability to forecast the future is whether you’d rather be right, even if the prediction is bad, or whether you’d rather keep your rose-colored glasses bright pink in hopes things work out. Also known as “doomsayer’s delight,” the ability to come up with correct predictions of negative events (“doomsaying”) could provide validation (“delight”) when those events come to pass. However, might it not be more likely to provide delight if your pessimism turns out to be ill-founded?

Perhaps you’re planning to attend a family reunion on the other side of the country. After reading all the media coverage of delays, cancellations, and other travel nightmares confronting airline passengers, you’re hesitant, wondering if the hassle factor will outweigh the fun. Even so, you decide to go for it. In the back of your mind, you contemplate the series of misfortunes that could unfold. By the time your bags are packed, you’re sure something will go wrong and you’ll miss most or all of the festivities.

Sure enough, the day comes, and a ping alerts you on the airline app to announce that the flight is canceled. By the time they can accommodate you, you’ll miss most of the fun. As miserable as you feel, you hate to admit that there does seem to be a kind of rough justice involved. You were right to worry.

The Dilemma of the Doomsayer’s Delight

According to a research team headed by Ben Gurion University’s Inon Raz and colleagues (2024), correctly predicting the future usually makes people feel better. Confirmation of your beliefs allows you to feel that much more in control of life’s seemingly random nature. So-called “epistemic motivation,” or the desire to understand situations (including the future), is a fundamental component of human nature. But what about when that prediction is fulfilled by your worst fears? Are you better off than you would have been if your worst-case scenario machinery proved faulty?

As Raz et al. point out, maybe even stronger than the desire to know what’s going to happen is the pleasure you feel when things turn out much better than you anticipated. You were wrong, but that’s soon forgotten in the pleasure of the bad event not coming to fruition. The moment you walk into the family reunion, all your doubts soon fly out of your head (unless you now start worrying about getting home).

Doomsayers exist in a world in which the catastrophic events they foretell reveal the world as a dangerous and aversive place but may be consoled by the accuracy of their predictions. In this case, their epistemic motivation wins out over the “pragmatic,” or ability to derive pleasure. What might also happen, according to the Ben Gurion U. authors, is that a time shift occurs in the pleasure-pain ratio, so that once you get going on the positive outcome you didn’t predict, epistemic motivation falls by the wayside.

The Emotional Trajectory of Prediction

Across two experimental studies, the researchers gave their 500 online participants the task of predicting whether positive vs. negative visual images shown to them on the screen would be regarded more positively if they were expected vs. not expected to show up. The four categories of possible stimuli were positive-surprise (expected negative but saw positive), positive-confirmed (expected and saw positive), negative surprise (expected positive but saw negative), and negative-confirmed (expected and saw negative).

The first study showed that, in contrast to the doomsayer’s delight principle, negative confirmations were not viewed more positively than positive surprise. Consistent with the value of pragmatic vs. epistemic motivation, “confirming negative predictions causes people to feel worse than being surprised by negative experiences.” There were not even any effects of “need for cognition” (the desire to know) or anxiety, as the positive outcome effect occurred across the board.

The second study explored additional individual difference factors including dogmatism (lack of willingness to gain information) and unwillingness to examine one’s own internal states. These factors had no moderating effects on the outcomes.

As the authors concluded, when the need to predict is balanced against the need to feel good, it’s feeling good that will win the day. In fact, “confirming pessimistic expectations caused people to feel significantly worse.” The only delight doomsayers seem to experience occurs when they’re proven wrong.

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Turning Doom Away From Gloom

It’s possible that people develop negative prediction mechanisms as some sort of protective tendency (“expect the worst but hope for the best”). However, as the Raz et al. study suggests, the rose-colored glasses are more adaptive, even if you might occasionally have to cope with disappointment.

Returning to that example of your family reunion, you could spend the months and weeks in preparation by fixating on all that could go wrong. But how much more enjoyable would it be to look forward to it in happy anticipation? Chat with your relatives, pick out your favorite outfits to bring along, and start counting down with relish. It’s fine to get a plan B in motion, but let it remain in the shadows rather than the forefront of your mind.

Even more to the point, once you’re actually at the event, don’t let the doomsday mentality spoil your fun. It’s possible you have to spend a night on the way home sleeping on the floor of an overcrowded airport, but why let that interfere with your purpose of being there in the first place? It may also be helpful to know that should you let your mind drift down those negative anticipation alleyways, you can bring it back with some mindfulness and living in the moment.

To sum up, let pragmatism win out over the need to have your worst fears confirmed. Finding fulfillment in the joy of the moment will better prepare you for whatever comes next, whether you predicted it or not.