eneral affective forecast that they would be much happier if only they could win the lottery. This is also true of people who have sufered debilitating accidents. A few years after the accident, despite long-term efects such as paralysis, accident victims were about as happy as they were before this life-changing event-again, despite the general afective forecast that they would be much unhappier.
Two concepts are used to explain these peculiar findings: focalism and presentism. Focalism is the tendency to underestimate the extent to which other events will influence our thoughts and feelings in the future. Presentism, as you might guess, addresses the fact that we put too much emphasis on the present in our prediction of the future. Taken together, this means that we focus on our current situation and how we feel now without enough consideration about the future situation, what might happen and how we might feel then (or have in similar situations in the past) .
Here are some common experiences of this: If we go grocery shopping just after a meal, we will generally underestimate how much we will eat in the week ahead and buy less. Addicts who have just ingested their drug of choice will underestimate how much they will crave the drug later. Irrationally, we think how we are feeling now is how we will feel later. The most astonishing thing about this is that it is true for simple things like current and future hunger states.
How Is This Related to Procrastnation?
We need to consider what this human bias in affective forecasting means to our understanding of procrastination.
By this point, the argument may be apparent. In making an intention for future action, we focus on our current afective state with the mistaken assumption that our afective state at the point we expect to act on our intention will be the same as it is now.
The real catch here is that when we intend a future action, our affective state is often particularly positive. Why?
There are two reasons.
Fi
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