Just make a new plan, Stan

Breaking up, it turns out, isn't that hard after all. A new study of out Northwestern University finds that people deal with the end of romantic relationships much better than they thought they would when asked ahead of time to predict their reaction to an impending break-up. The study contributes to a growing body of research which finds that people misjudge their reaction to emotional events in their lives. The study was co-authored by Carnegie Mellon Professor George Loewenstein and Ph.D. student Tamar Krishnamurti.

I'm reminded of this 2003 article in the New York Times Magazine that featured the research of Loewenstein, among others. The article examined our tendency as humans to overestimate the happiness we think we'll derive from positive events--such as winning the lottery or buying a dream house--as well as the sadness and distress that will accompany calamitous events, such as the death of a family member:

George Loewenstein sums up this human capacity as follows: ''Happiness is a signal that our brains use to motivate us to do certain things. And in the same way that our eye adapts to different levels of illumination, we're designed to kind of go back to the happiness set point. Our brains are not trying to be happy. Our brains are trying to regulate us.'' In this respect, the tendency toward adaptation suggests why the impact bias is so pervasive. As Tim Wilson says: ''We don't realize how quickly we will adapt to a pleasurable event and make it the backdrop of our lives. When any event occurs to us, we make it ordinary. And through becoming ordinary, we lose our pleasure.''

And of course, the reverse is true as well:

As Gilbert points out, this glitch is also significant when it comes to negative events like losing a job or the death of someone we love, in response to which we project a permanently inconsolable future. ''The thing I'm most interested in, that I've spent the most time studying, is our failure to recognize how powerful psychological defenses are once they're activated,'' Gilbert says. ''We've used the metaphor of the 'psychological immune system' -- it's just a metaphor, but not a bad one for that system of defenses that helps you feel better when bad things happen. Observers of the human condition since Aristotle have known that people have these defenses. Freud spent his life, and his daughter Anna spent her life, worrying about these defenses. What's surprising is that people don't seem to recognize that they have these defenses, and that these defenses will be triggered by negative events.''
 

Jonathan Potts