Abstract
Affective forecasting–predicting the emotional outcome of never-before experienced situations–is pervasive in our lives. When facing novel situations, we can quickly integrate bits and pieces of prior experiences to envisage possible scenarios and their outcomes, and what these might feel like. Such affective glimpses of the future often steer the decisions we make. By enabling principled decision-making in novel situations, affective forecasting confers the important adaptive advantage of eluding the potentially costly consequences of tackling such situations by trial-and-error. Affective forecasting has been hypothesized as uniquely human, yet, in a recent study we found suggestive evidence of this ability in an orangutan. To test non-verbal subjects, we capitalized on culinary examples of affective forecasting and devised a behavioral test that required the subjects to make predictions about novel juice mixes produced from familiar ingredients. In the present study, we administered the same task to two chimpanzees and found that their performance was comparable to that of the previously tested orangutan and 10 humans, who served as a comparison group. To improve the comparability of human and animal performance, in the present study we also introduced a new approach to assessing if the subjects’ performance was indicative of affective forecasting, which relies exclusively on behavioral data. The results of the study open for the possibility that affective forecasting has evolved in the common ancestor of the great apes, providing Hominids with the adaptive advantage of e.g., quickly evaluating heterogeneous food patches using hedonic prediction.
Highlights
Whether pondering if to try out a new dish, or where to overnight during a long trip, the challenge of making decisions in novel situations is common in our daily lives
To examine the subjects’ ability to make predictions concerning the hedonic outcome of never-before experienced situations, we presented them with novel choice situations inspired by culinary examples from the Affective forecasting (AF) literature, in which they had to choose between a familiar ingredient and a novel juice mix
To establish the validity of the new approach to AF assessment, we applied this approach to the data obtained in Sauciuc et al (2016), in which we found evidence of AF when 10 human participants and an orangutan were tested with the juice blending task
Summary
Whether pondering if to try out a new dish, or where to overnight during a long trip, the challenge of making decisions in novel situations is common in our daily lives. By bringing the forthcoming into the present, affective forecasts operate by default in an atemporal manner, and have immediate affective effects that motivate choices irrespective of whether these are set to happen in the immediate or more distant future (Gilbert et al, 2002). As such, these affective hints triggered by the choices at hand confer the important adaptive advantage of enabling principled decision-making in neverbefore experienced situations, eluding the potentially costly consequences of tackling such situations by trial-and-error (Gilbert and Wilson, 2007). Much AF research focuses on investigating forecasting biases and strategies to mitigate them, or their applied relevance to decision-making and planning in fields as diverse as economics, law, healthcare, or ethics
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