People are bad at predicting their emotions. Is that why we’re so polarized?

A professor hunches at her desk until the wee hours, churning out the academic papers she needs for tenure. A sports fan trembles with anxiety as her football team takes the field. A campaign official loses sleep over the prospect of his candidate coming up empty.

These high-stakes scenarios rest on the same common assumption: Achieving the desired outcome (tenure, a team championship, an election victory) will ensure lasting happiness, and falling short will breed deep despair. All of us engage in this kind of “affective forecasting” – predicting how we’re going to feel in the future.

But as researchers are discovering, we’re not nearly as good at it as we think. Studies show that, time after time, our predictions about