Jung, Mood and Nelson identified one of the reasons that users’ actual in-place experiences may not align with what other people anticipate they will be. The Jung-lead team determined that “when making predictions about others, people rely on their intuitive core representation of the experience (e.g., is the experience generally positive?) in lieu of a more complex representation that might also include countervailing aspects (e.g., is any of the experience negative?)…the overestimation bias is pervasive for a wide range of positive…and negative experiences…relative to themselves, people believe that an identically paying other will get more enjoyment from the same experience, but paradoxically, that an identically enjoying other will pay more for the same experience.” We feel that others’ experiences will be more purely positive or negative than ours are in the same situations.
So, in short, we estimate that, compared to ourselves, other people will pay or wait more for an experience seen as desirable, as well as will enjoy it more when it is in-process. With undesirable experiences, we estimate other people will be willing to pay more to avoid them and that others will find them worse than we would.
Minah Jung, Alice Mood, and Leif Nelson. “Overestimating the Valuations and Preferences of Others.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, in press, https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0000700
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design With Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.