How Bad Could It Be?

The ability to foresee exactly how we’ll feel after a difficult talk—asking a loved one a touchy question or executing a long-delayed breakup—would be a kind of superpower. Unfortunately, research on our capacity to anticipate future emotional states, also called affective forecasting, indicates that our accuracy is imperfect at best. Recently, researchers explored how faulty forecasts might cloud our view of potentially valuable interactions.

An honest talk with a close friend, for example, can help resolve conflict and strengthen the relationship, says psychologist Emma Levine of the University of Chicago. “It’s what I would call a necessary evil,” she says. “It’s certainly uncomfortable to have conversations with people about negative information of any type, yet it’s necessary in that it promotes long-term understanding.” People who plan to open up, she says, “really focus on that evil part. There’s such fear of causing harm.” Levine and psychologist Taya Cohen found that when friends, romantic partners, roommates, and other pairs were brought into the lab for a frank conversation—with one instructed to give critical feedback to the other—the feedback-givers predicted that the exchanges would be less enjoyable than they later reported the talks to be. Studies of other kinds of honest expression showed similar results.

“Conversation partners don’t react as negatively to the conversations as communicators expect,” Levine reports. When one person relates something honestly but with benign intent, the other may be unexpectedly receptive because that person appreciates “the broader context of relationships, which in most cases revolve around good intentions.” Still, the results suggest to Levine that the mispredictions she observed could lead people to avoid initiating such conversations.

Another encounter that many are eager to dodge? Having to listen to someone with different political views. Harvard researchers recently found evidence that study participants overestimated how negatively they would feel after, for instance, watching a speech by a senator from the opposing party. (One reason, it seems, was that they thought they would disagree with such a speech more than they ultimately did.) Participants who were informed about the possibility of such emotional surprises were somewhat more likely to seek out online material from the other side of the aisle when given the chance.

From criticizing a friend or hearing out opponents to asking for a raise or meeting strangers, “there are all sorts of social interactions that could be awkward or uncomfortable,” says psychologist Linda Levine at the University of California, Irvine. Her own research on affective forecasting suggests that people often aren’t far off in predicting the peak intensity of an emotion that they will feel, she says—but they still tend to be mistaken about how long it will last and the impact it will have on their mood in general. “What they’re not taking into account,” she says, “is the fact that, overall, the experience is more than just those moments of discomfort.”