Most of us think that if we win the first prize in a lottery we’ll be happy forever.
A few days ago four fellow inhabitants of Singapore won the TOTO Hongbao draw bagging about S$3 Million each. Soon they will find out first hand whether our forecast is true or not.
The research on happiness after striking it big in the lottery suggests that not only is it not true, but if anything, lottery winners become less happy.
The main culprit for that? Their lives are disrupted in any number of ways which makes them unhappy.
So, why do we still dream of winning the lottery or having a better future? We suffer from the affective forecasting errors. Ok, let’s not suffer so much. So to put it positive, we are great in affective misforecasting.
The psychologist Daniel Gilbert suggests a simple antidote to that inborn error of ......