Abstract
AbstractOne way of informing health policy decisions is to ask people about the impact that different health states would have on their future subjective well‐being. The present research explored the relation between anticipated and experienced changes in health‐related subjective well‐being, and examined whether affective forecasting errors could be reduced by psychological distancing manipulations. Using survey methodology, we tested whether people can accurately estimate the impact of different possible health states on their subjective well‐being. We also manipulated psychological distance: Forecasts were made about present self, future self, or others. Based on construal level theory and past work on affective forecasting errors, our prediction was that increasing psychological distance may reduce the mismatch between anticipated and experienced impact of health states on subjective well‐being. We found that the impact of ill health on subjective well‐being was greatly overpredicted and that this overprediction was not eliminated when participants were asked to make predictions about themselves in the future or about other people. Consistent with past work, we found that our participants correctly expected that their subjective well‐being would deteriorate more if they experienced the highest levels of mental illness as compared to the highest intensities of pain or most severe limitations to physical functioning.
Highlights
How does ill health affect subjective well‐being (SWB; here operation‐ alized as self‐rated satisfaction with life), and is it possible to quantify the impact of illness on SWB? The answers to such questions matter for our understanding of SWB, and for policymakers who may wish to value different health states in terms of the loss of SWB that they bring
We examined people's ability to predict the relationship between hypothetical future health states they might experience and their future SWB
Our goal was to determine whether it is possible to ob‐ tain reasonable valuations of health states by explicitly asking peo‐ ple to predict the impact different health states would have on SWB
Summary
How does ill health affect subjective well‐being (SWB; here operation‐ alized as self‐rated satisfaction with life), and is it possible to quantify the impact of illness on SWB? The answers to such questions matter for our understanding of SWB, and for policymakers who may wish to value (for the purposes of resource allocation) different health states in terms of the loss of SWB that they bring. It is well established that people typically misestimate the affective consequences of future events (Kahneman & Snell, 1990; Loewenstein, O'Donoghue, & Rabin, 2003). These affective forecasting errors can lead to a mismatch between the expected impact of health states on one's SWB, and the likely ac‐ tual change in SWB if such health states are experienced. We examined these affective forecasting errors in the specific context of health states and SWB. The aim of this paper was to examine people's ability to forecast health‐related SWB changes and to determine whether it is possible to debias people's forecasts using psychological distancing manipulations
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