asked people to imagine how happy a winner of the lottery and a recently diagnosed HIV patient would be. The researchers were able to reduce the amount of focalism by exposing participants to detailed and mundane descriptions of each person's life, meaning that the more information the participants had on the lottery winner and the HIV patient the less they were able to only focus on few factors, these participants subsequently estimated similar levels of happiness for the HIV patient as well as the lottery-winner. As for the control participants, they made unrealistically disparate predictions of happiness. This could be due to the fact that the more information that is available, the less likely it is one will be able to ignore contributory factors. Time discounting Time discounting (or time preference) is the tendency to weigh present events over future events. Immediate gratification is preferred to delayed gratification, especially over longer periods of time and with younger children or adolescents. For example, a child may prefer one piece of candy now (1 candy/0 seconds=infinity candies/second) instead of five pieces of candy in four months (5 candies/10540800 seconds≈0.00000047candies/second). The bigger the candies/second, the more people like it. This pattern is sometimes referred to as hyperbolic discounting or "present bias" because people's judgements are biased toward present events. Economists often cite time discounting as a source of mispredictions of future utility. Memory Affective forecasters often rely on memories of past events. When people report memories of past events they may leave out important details, change things that occurred, and even add things that have not happened. This suggests the mind constructs memories based on what actually happened, and other factors including the person's knowledge, experiences, and existing schemas. Using highly available, but unrepresentative memories, increases the impact bias. Baseball fans, for example, tend to use the best game they can remember as the basis for their affective forecast of the game they are about to see. Commuters are similarly likely to base their forecasts of how unpleasant it would feel to miss a train on their memory of the worst time they missed the train Various studies indicate that retroactive assessments of past experiences are prone to various errors, such as duration neglect or decay bias. People tend to overemphasize the peaks and ends of their experiences when assessing them (peak/end bias), instead of analyzing the event as a whole. For example,