ماهیت متنی و سیستماتیک از داوری های رضایت از زندگی

Five studies were conducted to examine the nature of life satisfaction judgments. When the category of “excitement” was made accessible experimentally, individuals based their life satisfaction judgments more heavily on the frequency of excitement, in comparison to a “peaceful” condition in Study 1 and to both “neutral priming” and “no-priming” conditions in Study 2. A 7-day diary study (Study 3) showed that as “excitement” became naturally more accessible on weekends, the correlations between excitement and daily satisfaction also increased significantly. Study 3 thus illustrated a systematic contextual shift in the bases of life satisfaction judgments. Study 4 showed that high sensation seekers, for whom “excitement” should be chronically accessible, based their life satisfaction judgments more heavily on the frequency of excitement than did low sensation seekers. Finally, Study 5 demonstrated that the chronic accessibility of “excitement” measured at Time 1 predicted the degree to which individuals based their life satisfaction judgments on the frequency of excitement at Time 2. Altogether, these five studies highlight the contextually sensitive, yet systematic nature of life satisfaction judgments. When the legendary North Carolina basketball coach Dean Smith announced his retirement in 1997, he explained his decision as follows: “I examine every October if I am excited about coaching, and I wasn’t this year.” As Schwarz and Clore (1996) maintain, answers to such questions as “Am I excited about this job?” and “Am I satisfied with my life?” can provide crucial information pertinent to significant life decisions (see also Clore, Schwarz, & Conway, 1994; Schwarz & Strack, 1999 for review). The dependability of such judgments is questionable, however. For instance, Midwesterners may decide to move to California because they believe that the better climate would make them happier there (Schkade & Kahneman, 1998). Similarly, assistant professors may work hard because they believe that not getting tenure would be devastating (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, & Wheatley, 1998). But Californians are not happier than Midwesterners (Schkade & Kahneman, 1998), and faculty who fail to get tenure are not as unhappy as people might think (Gilbert et al., 1998). Midwesterners tend to overestimate the role of climate in California, and assistant professors tend to overestimate the role of tenure in their well-being. These phenomena are called the focusing illusion (Schkade & Kahneman, 1998) and focalism (Gilbert et al., 1998), because people weigh salient (focal) information disproportionately when forecasting future affective states or judging the life satisfaction of others.