The Role of Affective Expectations in Subjective Experience and Decision-Making

Two studies explored the extent to which prior affective expectations shape people's evaluations of experiences and decisions about repeating those experiences. Study 1 found that students' prior expectations about an upcoming vacation accounted for a significant portion of the variance in their post-vacation evaluations, as did students' recall of specific experiences. In Study 2, both prior expectations and actual experiences of watching a movie were manipulated in a 2 × 2 design. People's affective expectations made more of a difference than the objective experience when assessing people's willingness to participate in the study again. A reinterpretation hypothesis—that people discount or reweigh memories of expectation-inconsistent events—accounted for the results of these studies better than a selective memory or initial effects hypothesis.