Mispredicting and the Philadelphia Eagles
there’s a large, and burgeoning, writings on the ways that individuals mispredict their own happiness. the classic examples are the loss of happiness from injury (becoming a paraplegic) and the payment in gladness from winning a lottery. in both scenarios, we mispredict how actual individuals meet with the losses and gains. another completely cooked-known result is one of particular salience today: individuals aren’t as unhappy when their sports teams fritter as they predicted they would be, nor does their happiness mould as long as they anticipated. scholars argue that we adapt, quickly, and revert to our baseline happiness.
I’ve learned from the work of my colleague Peter Huang, and my former colleague Rick Swedloff, that we should all be a little bit more skeptical about the hedonic adaptation literature, and its adaptation to legal policy. Here’s a particular example. The literature might predict that when my Eagles beat the (hated) NY Giants today to advance to the NFC Championship, I would be joyful briefly, but then would adapt, so that I’d be moderately pleased by dinner and phlegmatic by the late evening. Indeed, on this theory, I might have started to adapt as soon as it was clear (by the mid-fourth-quarter that the Eagles weren’t going to execute their long-planned choking maneuver. And, I certainly would be aware that this win only sets me up for a greater feeling of disappointment. next week, when the Birds lose to a decidedly inferior Cardinals team. If behaving at all rationally, I should price that anticipated regret into my current mood.
Not so. I still feel pretty darn good. And, though I feel for certain Giants fans, I have concluded that the forces of evil once again have lost a battle today. Philly is on the march.
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