“How Happy Was I, Anyway?” A Retrospective Impact Bias

People often overestimate the impact future events will have on their happiness. People may also show a retrospective impact bias, overestimating the impact of past events on their happiness, explaining why they do not learn from experience and correct their forecasts. We found such a bias for positive events; e.g., supporters of George Bush overestimated how happy they had been when the U. S. presidential election was determined. For negative events, people's recall was related to how much they were still rationalizing the outcome. Gore supporters rationalized the election by changing their views of the candidates. Four months later their positive view of Gore had returned, and they overestimated how unhappy they had been. In Study 2, poor performers on a test rationalized their performance by downplaying the test's validity. Two weeks later they continued to rationalize, and recalled accurately that they had not been very upset by their performance.