Easy to Retrieve but Hard to Believe

Abstract

People who recall or forecast many pleasant moments should perceive themselves as happier in the past or future than people who generate few such moments; the same principle should apply to generating unpleasant moments and perceiving unhappiness. Five studies suggest that this is not always true. Rather, people’s metacognitive experience of ease of thought retrieval (“fluency”) can affect perceived well-being over time beyond actual thought content. The easier it is to recall positive past experiences, the happier people think they were at the time; likewise, the easier it is to recall negative past experiences, the unhappier people think they were. But this is not the case for predicting the future. Although people who easily generate positive forecasts predict more future happiness, people who easily generate negative forecasts do not infer future unhappiness. Given pervasive tendencies to underestimate the likelihood of experiencing negative events, people apparently discount hard-to-believe metacognitive feelings (e.g., easily imagined unpleasant futures). Paradoxically, people’s well-being may be maximized when they contemplate some bad moments or just a few good moments.