Essays on Hedonic Contrast

This dissertation is about how the ways people make comparisons determine when, how intensely, and for how long they experience hedonic contrast. The first two essays show that people tend to focus more on comparisons in the negative domain than in the positive domain, such that (a) they tend to make comparisons when evaluating inherently negative outcomes, but not when evaluating inherently positive outcomes, causing pain to be more contrast-dependent than pleasure, and (b) if items are not inherently positive or negative, but rather, are made to appear positive or negative by virtue of how they compare with one another, people make the comparison quantitatively when evaluating the worse item but qualitatively when evaluating the better item, and therefore the size of the difference between items affects negative contrast but not positive contrast. The third essay focuses on how contrast affects experiences over time. It shows that when people go through an experience that has a negative feature, expecting this feature to change – either for better or for worse – in a subsequent experience leads people to sustain attention on this feature, inhibiting adaptation to it. Therefore, contrast can affect not only the intensity, but also the persistence, of hedonic experiences

The Unpredictable Positive Effects of Sports Gambling: Gamblers Think Losing Feels Worse Than it Actually Feels

Implications statement Gamblers underestimate how much fun small wagers add to enjoying sports events. They think losing will feel worse than it really does. Simple reminder can correct this misprediction. Abstract When considering whether to gamble on a sporting event, people may ask themselves how winning or losing will affect their experience. In a series of four experiments, we find that people under-appreciate the positive effect of gambling on watching sporting events, in a way that causes them to under-value the opportunity to place a small stakes gamble. While participants predict that a gamble will enhance or diminish an experience depending on the outcome, we find that a small bet has an asymmetric hedonic effect, making sports events more enjoyable for people who wager and win, and not any less enjoyable for people who wager and lose. We demonstrate that people do not predict this asymmetry because that they fail to spontaneously consider the ongoing enjoyment experienced while watching an event, and that when asked to consider their experience during the game, they predict gambling will be more enjoyable. Extending our results into other types of gambles, we find that the hedonic benefit of gambling (and people’s hedonic mispredictions of it) occur even for other types of wagers, such as a betting on a series of coin flips