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decision making
You think your happiness depends on one specific circumstance.
Focalism is the tendency to overestimate the extent to which one specific event will impact your long-term emotional state.
When you focus on a single event, you fail to account for the countless other daily realities that will continue to shape your life. By centering your future on one change, you ignore the baseline of your normal mood.
You are rarely as impacted by a single event as you predict.
Where this comes from
- Study
- Wilson et al., 2000
- What the check found
- Wilson, T. D., et al. (2000) is the correct seminal paper. The definition provided is the accepted psychological definition of the phenomenon as described in that study.
- Confidence
- Solid, with limits
Related
One of these every day, and every one names the study it came from. When a finding is contested, it says so.