duration of impact) of such events. Immune Neglect: We have unconscious psychological processes such as ego defense, dissonance reductions, self-serving biases, etc. that will cushion the effects of a negative event. When making predictions, people are generally unaware of these unconscious processes, and fail to take them into account when making affective forecasts. Consequences In the context of decision-making, the impact bias has important consequences. When making decisions (ranging from deciding whether to move to California or not to deciding whether to bike or drive to work), people attempt to predict the outcome of their decisions by projecting their emotional reactions to future events (e.g.: “How will this make me feel?”). Thereby, they base their decisions on affective forecasts (Wilson & Gilbert, 2005). Erroneous projections about future emotional reactions, such as overestimating the intensity and durability of affect (i.e.: impact bias) can lead to mistaken projections. These mistakes impact decisions, and misguide people into making decisions that are not compatible with their future states and may be harmful to their wellbeing. The impact bias can also result in error in recollecting memories. People display retrospective impact bias when they overestimate the intensity and duration of an emotional reaction to a past event. This can lead to errors in decision making because it can lead people overestimating how an event positively or negatively impacts their wellbeing. Furthermore, people are influenced by their current emotion when recalling their past emotions. This can explain why people do not learn from their mistakes, and make more accurate forecasts. This phenomenon can cause people to make irrational or unbalanced decisions because they recollect that an example was positive (or negative), but fail to recollect the degree of positive (or negative) effect, leading to an inaccurate cost-benefit analysis. Development in children Recent evidence suggests that 3, 4 and 5 year-old children show an impact bias for the intensity of their negative future emotions, but not their positive future emotions. See also List of cognitive biases Hot-cold empathy gap Hedonic treadmill Projection bias Affective Forecasting Decision-making Distinction bias Focusing effects Duration neglect References Sources External links Video of Gilbert discussing humans' failure to predict what makes us happy. Presented July 2005 at the TED Conference in Oxford, UK. Duration: 22:02 Impact Bias course on www.RN.org Cognitive biases