The Pain Is Never as Bad as We Fear

The reason Gilbert's research has broad resonance beyond elections is that the fear of pain and hurt keep many people from taking chances with life and love. It helps explain why human beings are extraordinarily risk-averse: Experiments show, for example, that people are far more worried about losing a certain amount of money than losing out on the opportunity to make that same amount of money -- even though the loss of a potential gain ought to sting as much as an outright loss.

What people forget, Gilbert said, is that we have a psychological immune system that works very much like a physiological immune system. After a loss, people find themselves distracted by events that have nothing to do with the loss. They realize they have other things in their life they are grateful about, or simply other things they must attend to. But this is difficult to sense ahead of time -- indeed, when you are asked to imagine a terrible thing happening to you or someone else, it feels crass to say that after a tragedy we will still be spending time fuming in traffic jams or laughing at inane television shows.

When people are asked to predict how they will feel about something, they think about just that one thing instead of all the other things that make up everyday life.

"When you ask people how would you feel a year after going blind, they imagine a lack of eyesight," Gilbert said. "A year after this happens, every day is not about being blind, it is about making peanut butter sandwiches for your children and getting to work. Being blind is not a full-time job."

And people also fail to realize their immense (and immensely healthy) capacity to rationalize losses away.

Think Gilbert is talking through his hat? Consider this.

Two weeks before Election Day, Gilbert made me a prediction: "If the Democrats take the House and if the Democrats take the Senate, within 48 hours Republicans will be explaining to themselves why this will not be a bad thing," he said. They will say, " 'It will help the next election. It will discipline the White House.' In a week, many Republicans will wonder why they ever wanted it to be otherwise."

And here is what conservative Rich Lowry, editor of National Review, told Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz last week after the election: that "there's also been a sense among conservatives for a long time that Republicans deserved to be taken to the woodshed, and perhaps this will be cathartic."

Gilbert was wrong about only one thing. Lowry's rationalization took only 24 hours.