Affective Forecasting About Future Events: My Friend Better Than Me?

Recent findings suggest that we neglect our personality to predict our future emotional reactions to specific events by focusing only on the events, inducing wrong forecasts. An interesting question to investigate is that our friends could predict better our affective states about future events because they take into account our personal dispositions. In the present study, sixty-nine pairs of students (participant/friend) were asked to predict their emotional reactions and those for a friend on a 7-point Likert scale, ranging from 1 (very bad) to 7 (very good) two months before they will obtain their results for one examination. All the participants were contacted by SMS the day when the results were available, and were requested to rate their present affective states. Results showed that emotional predictions were different as compared to the current emotions for extreme results (upper than 8/10, and below 4/10) for the main participants but also for their friends, meaning that all the subjects predicted more positive emotions than current ones for very good results, and more negative emotions than current ones for very bad results. In contrast, the predictions were right for middle results (between 5/10 and 7/10) for both groups. These findings do not show that our friends are better predictors of our future emotional states than us. One possible explanation is that in present study, both participants and friends were concerned about the future event (i.e., academic results). So, our friends could be better forecasters only in the case of future events not shared.