Book the flight home for Thanksgiving, go to that party even though you’re tired, and write that thank you note. You may feel these experiences are not that significant in your busy life today, but according to Erin Westgate, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida, you are likely wrong.
Westgate and her team of researchers at the Florida Social Cognition and Emotion Lab received a grant from the National Science Foundation to investigate the factors that lead people to underestimate the meaningfulness of future life experiences.
“This started a long time ago when I was in grad school where I was talking to another student who asked me if we know how meaningful events will be in the future,” Westgate said. That was in the fall, just before the Thanksgiving holiday.
“Surely people know how significant Thanksgiving will be, right? It’s the poster child for gratitude and meaning,” she said.
After conducting a study with University of Virginia undergraduates, asking them about a week before the holiday how meaningful they expected it would be for them and comparing it to their answers after, the results were surprising. Students were overwhelmingly wrong in their estimate of feelings around the holiday, according to Westgate.
At UF, most of Westgate’s research is largely high impact lab-based, but during the pandemic in 2020, she decided to revisit the findings from her previous work. “We found it once, but can we find it again,” Westgate questioned.
With a larger sample of UF undergrads, Westgate saw the same result. People were clearly underestimating how meaningful their Thanksgiving holidays turned out to be.
“We want to live meaningful lives, we want to do meaningful things and so if we are not realizing that an experience is going to be meaningful, we may be less likely to do it and miss out on these potential sources of meaning in our own lives,” Westgate said.
The base of this new research is understanding that individuals make major decisions on how they anticipate a particular experience will make them feel. From large, life changing decisions such as choosing a career, or starting a family, to participating in holiday events and family gatherings, people make decisions, according to Westgate on choices that foster a sense of purpose and lead to a purposeful and fulfilling life.
The three-year study will use both field and lab experiments to discover why people tend to underestimate life experiences such as career choices, volunteer efforts and even mundane tasks like writing thank you notes and filing taxes. Both positive and negative experiences will be evaluated including the acceptance or denial of medical school applications.
The study will also explore meaningful growth experiences that involve discomfort. Here in particular, if discomfort is involved, individuals may avoid a particular decision that if carried out, could have a significant life impact in developing resilience and potential deep satisfaction of personal sacrifice.
“We don’t make sense of events until they actually happen. We don’t process events until we need to, when they actually happen and not before,” said Westgate. “If we try to make sense of things before they happen, the downside of that is that we are not appreciating how meaningful they will be.”
The goal of the research is to offer ideas on how we can fix this underestimation. When we more fully understand why people are making these mistakes in judgement, we hope we can move on to how we can potentially fix this problem, according to Westgate.
“Sometimes we go into a project, and we know what we are going to find. This is one of those projects that surprised us,” said Westgate. “I love a problem; I love a puzzle, and this was a puzzle I couldn’t ignore.”
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