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Your brain is a terrible fortune teller
The track record
The track record is easy to list. It convinced you the relationship was over because a text took a few hours. It told you that you'd embarrass yourself before a presentation that became one of the best meetings you've ever had. It kept you awake the night before a performance review, certain you'd be fired, when your boss was preparing to give you praise.
Two backpacks
Two backpacks make the comparison concrete. In one goes every worst-case scenario the brain ever invented: each imagined rejection, possible failure, and disaster that was on its way. It is unbelievably heavy, because the mind can invent an endless supply of painful failures. In the other goes what actually happened, and it is always the lighter of the two.
What anxiety asks a person to carry in advance is rarely as impossible to handle as what actually unfolds. The sleepless nights over problems that never arrived, and the stories narrated with confidence that reality never followed, all count against the fortune teller. The brain will keep making predictions, since that is what healthy human brains do, and the open question is whether this one has earned any trust.
How accurate are professional forecasters?
Psychologist Philip Tetlock tracked about 284 experts making roughly 28,000 predictions about politics over two decades, and reported the results in his 2005 book Expert Political Judgment. The experts barely outperformed simple statistical baselines. Those who held one big idea and spoke most confidently, whom Tetlock called hedgehogs, did worse than those who drew on many sources.
Why do people expect to feel worse than they do?
Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson call this impact bias. In studies of events such as breakups and election results, people predicted stronger and longer-lasting feelings than they reported afterward. One reason they identified is focalism: when imagining a future event, people focus on the event itself and leave out everything else that will fill their days. A second is that people underestimate how quickly they make sense of bad news.
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