Will Reaching Your Goal Feel as Good as You Picture? What Professors Denied Tenure Showed

Outside a polling place on the University of Texas campus in 1994, a researcher stopped 57 voters and asked how happy they were and how happy they expected to be a month after the governor’s race, depending on whether their candidate won or lost. A month later she reached 25 of them by phone. Ann Richards had lost to George W. Bush, and her supporters turned out to be about as happy as before the election. They had predicted a drop.

That small study sits inside a 1998 paper that matters to anyone chasing a goal. Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg and Wheatley published “Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (volume 75, pages 617 to 638). Does reaching a goal feel as good as you picture? Probably less good and for less time than the picture suggests. The paper’s strongest evidence, though, concerns bad outcomes, which fade faster than people expect. The good-outcome evidence is thinner.

What did the six studies actually do?

The authors asked people to forecast how happy they would be some time after an event, then compared those forecasts with how people who had lived through the event reported feeling.

1. Romance (Study 1). From 532 usable Texas undergraduates, students who had never had a breakup predicted a happiness of 3.89 on a 7-point scale two months after one. Students who had been through a breakup reported about 5.4. The same students who were single predicted, fairly accurately, the lift from a new relationship.
2. Tenure (Study 2). Current assistant professors in Texas liberal arts departments forecast their happiness in years 1 to 10 after a tenure decision. Former assistant professors who had been granted or denied tenure between 1984 and 1994 reported their actual happiness.
3. Election (Study 3). The voter study above: 25 of the 57 voters were reached, 10 losers and 15 winners. Losers were happier than they had predicted.
4. Personality feedback (Study 4), a child’s death story (Study 5) and a job rejection (Study 6) were lab studies. Each staged a bad event that was easy to explain away in one condition and hard in another, then checked whether forecasters noticed the difference.

They mostly did not. In Study 6, participants prepared answers for a paid product-testing job and were then rejected, either by one MBA student asking loosely relevant questions or by a team of three who would reject someone only unanimously, with each question tied to the job. Forecasters expected the two rejections to feel alike. Ten minutes later the clearly fair rejection stung more, because it was harder to dismiss.

What happened to the professors?

This is the study closest to goal pursuit. Forecasters predicted happiness near 5.90 for the first five years after winning tenure and near 3.42 after losing it, converging by years 6 to 10. People who had actually been through it averaged 5.24 after tenure and 4.71 after denial in the first five years. Over 6 to 10 years the forecasts and the real reports roughly agreed.

So the sting of denial was shorter than predicted, and the glow of success was also a bit smaller than predicted, a difference the authors report at p = .047. Treat the good-news side gently. Only 7 recent denied professors answered, response rates ran from 34 to 65 percent depending on the group, and the authors themselves say the small numbers call for caution.

Why would the mind neglect its own repair work?

The authors call the machinery a psychological immune system: rationalizing, reframing, discounting the judge. It works best when nobody is watching, so people do not see it coming. Picture packing for a week away using only the forecast for day one. The first day’s weather is accurate. It just says little about day six, and a forecast of your feelings built on the first reaction does the same.

What does this mean for choosing goals?

Forecasts steer decisions, which the authors stress in their opening pages. If you pick a goal because finishing it will feel wonderful for a long time, the paper gives you reason to discount that. The same applies to the dread side: fear of failing can be inflated.

Two practical moves follow. Choose goals partly for the days spent pursuing them, since that is where most of the hours are. Research on self-concordant goals points the same way. And write your forecast of the finish line down. The Brier-score log for personal goals is one way to find out how far off your predictions run.

What does it mean for staying consistent?

A missed day is a small bad event, and the same repair machinery will go to work on it. Your forecast that one lapse will sour the whole month is probably too gloomy. The flip side is that people also overpredict how motivating the finish will feel. Ordinary hedonic adaptation takes care of the rest, so reward the process now.

A pre-mortem uses dire forecasts on purpose, and the paper notes people sometimes inflate bad predictions to motivate themselves. That can help, as long as you remember the forecast runs hot. The same forecasting trouble shows up in plans, as why a night-time plan misjudges the morning explains.

How far do these findings stretch?

The paper’s own six studies are US student and faculty samples, from 1998. Some were cross-sectional, so people who chose the outcomes may differ from those who did not; Study 3 followed one group over time to address that. The election and tenure groups are small. And a forecast of “a month later” is not quite the same as a forecast of a lasting goal. What survives is a modest claim: people expect emotions to last longer than they do, and the evidence is firmest for losses.