Impact bias is an emotional state which every person goes through. People overestimate the outcome of when they are both happy or sad. It is an emotional state that everyone goes through in life as Dan Gilbert said. Impact bias was first known as durabilty bias.
People may see impact bias differently than others but my view to it is as when a person overestimates the duration of being happy or sad in the future. An example is that a sports fan would feel very happy if their team won but based on impact bias the person is actually not as happy as they assume. i also believe people overestimate how long that feeling will go on for.
Focalism can be a cause of impact bias. Focalism is when people tend to think about an event that’s going to occur in the future rather then whats going on at that time. In that case people forget that there are going to be many events coming the future that can be both positive and negative. I beleive if people focus too much on one thing or event they wont be as aware of other things or events that they can encounter.
People are unconsious of how they deal with focalism. Unconsiousness is when we do things and we don’t really realize it. Researchers are not sure why people overestimate emotional events and outcomes in life. They have found two phenomena that may take people to go through this. When people predict how they will feel in the future they ignore how other events are likely to have impact on their sense of well being. Researchers have also found that people underestimate the way they encounter events and outcomes in life gives changes on the emotional impact and how they will end up feeling. That is something similar to as Dan Gilbert called as “sense making process”.
