A distinction is made between decision utility, experienced utility, and predicted utility and an experiment is reported addressing people's ability to forecast experienced utility. Subjects in two experiments made predictions of their future liking for stimuli to which they were then exposed daily for one week. The stimuli were ice cream in a pilot study, plain yogurt in the main study, and short musical pieces in both studies. Decreased liking was the modal prediction, even when the true outcome was increased liking, or reduced dislike. There was substantial stability of tastes, but there were also substantial individual differences in the size and even the sign of changes in liking with repeated exposure. There was little or no correlation between the predictions of hedonic change that individuals made and the changes they actually experienced. KEY WORDS Self-prediction Utility Temporal preferencesAlthough students of decision-making behavior often view themselves as critics of the rational model of economics and pure decision theory, that model has a pervasive influence on the agenda of behavioral research. In particular, the positivistic methodology of economics and the powerful myth of economic rationality have contributed to a severely impoverished conception of utility, the central variable of decision theory. Utility is generally interpreted, even by behavioral researchers, as an intervening variable that is derived from observed choices and has no surplus meaning of its own. This may be one of the few surviving examples of rigid operationalism in current behavioral research. The focus on revealed preferences as the sole measure of utility is not only a methodological choice; it also reflects the standard assumption that economic agents are rational, and therefore make the choices that are most likely to turn out best for them. Little is left in this usage of the original sense of utility in the writings of Bernoulli, Bentham, and Mills, where it was identified with the hedonic quality of experience (Stigler, 1950). In the classic usage, still current in discussion of utilitarian philosophy (Glover, 1990), utility is a characteristic of experienced outcomes, not an inference from observed decisions.A straightforward suggestion is to distinguish two basic concepts of utility (Kahneman and Snell, 1990). The decision utility of a possible outcome is defined by the sign and weight of that outcome

Consumer beliefs about influences on liking are explored. Questionnaires were administered to explore the extent to which respondents’ implicit beliefs resemble any of six concepts established in experimental psychology. Results indicate respondents apply beliefs consistent with classical conditioning and Weber's law and expect adaptation to occur in a wide variety of situations. They do not show a general belief in cognitive dissonance effects. They probably do not believe in affective opponent processes (rebound) or the ability of exposure alone (“mere exposure”) to increase liking, although the beliefs they do apply predict the same outcome in some contexts. Implications for consumer behavior are discussed.

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