Accuracy and artifact: Reexamining the intensity bias in affective forecasting.

Research on affective forecasting shows that people have a robust tendency to overestimate the intensity of future emotion. We hypothesized that (a) people can accurately predict the intensity of their feelings about events and (b) a procedural artifact contributes to people's tendency to overestimate the intensity of their feelings in general. People may misinterpret the forecasting question as asking how they will feel about a focal event, but...