The illusion of courage in self‐predictions: Mispredicting one's own behavior in embarrassing situations

Abstract

People exhibit an ''illusion of courage'' when predicting their own behavior in embarrassing situations. In three experiments, participants overestimated their own willingness to engage in embarrassing public performances in exchange for money when those performances were psychologically distant: Hypothetical or in the relatively distant future. This illusion of courage occurs partly because of cold/hot empathy gaps. That is, people in a relatively ''cold'' unemotional state underestimate the influence on their own preferences and behaviors of being in a relative ''hot'' emotional state such as social anxiety evoked by an embarrassing situation. Consistent with this cold/hot empathy gap explanation, putting people ''in touch'' with negative emotional states by arousing fear (Experiments 1 and 2) and anger (Experiment 2) decreased people's willingness to engage in psychologically distant embarrassing public performances. Conversely, putting people ''out of touch'' with social anxiety through aerobic exercise, which reduces state anxiety and increases confidence, increased people's willingness to engage in psychologically distance embarrassing public performances (Experiment 3). Implications for self-predictions, self-evaluation, and affective forecasting are discussed.

Balancing the Basket: The Role of Shopping Basket Composition in Embarrassment

“…To wit, the decision to purchase additional products as an embarrassment mitigation strategy implies that the consumer has forecasted embarrassment in two hypothetical scenarios-purchasing the embarrassing product alone and purchasing the embarrassing product with additional items -and has determined that additional products would make the impending purchase less embarrassing. Moreover, prior research has demonstrated that people tend to exhibit an "illusion of courage" when predicting their own behavior in embarrassing situations, such that they underestimate the influence embarrassment will have on their own preferences and behaviors (Van Boven et al 2012). This suggests that any effect of embarrassment observed in hypothetical situations is likely to be even stronger when consumers are confronted with real purchase scenarios.…”

Too much experience: A desensitization bias in emotional perspective taking.

“…For example, participants who faced a purely hypothetical choice to engage in an embarrassing performance (dancing to Rick James' "Super Freak") overestimated how willing they would be to perform and underestimated how much they would demand to be paid compared with those who faced a real and immediate choice (Van Boven, Loewenstein, Welch, & Dunning, 2012). In tum, participants overestimated how willing others would be to perform and underestimated how much others would demand to be paid in the same way (Van Boven, Loewenstein, & Dunning, 2005), The general notion of using one's own "cold" unemotional state as a proxy to judge someone else's "hot" emotional state has been shown across a variety of related contexts.…”

Affect as a Decision-Making System of the Present

“…Whereas the time horizons examined in Ekman and Lundberg's (1971) studies spanned decades and even centuries, similar results have been obtained recently by Van Boven, White, and Huber (2009) with much shorter time horizons involving several minutes or even seconds. Other findings show that because emotional reactions intensify with the temporal proximity of the event, their effects on judgments and behaviors are stronger when the event is nearer in time (Huber et al 2011;Van Boven et al 2012). For example, Van Boven and colleagues (2012) found that many participants who had agreed to tell a joke in public several days earlier subsequently "chickened out" just minutes before the actual performance.…”