Every day of your life is filled with some degree of uncertainty. You’re waiting to know if your friend will respond to you after sending a silly message accompanied by your favorite emoticons. Maybe, you worry, your friend will find it offensive. Other daily events take on greater proportions. You have applied for a new position and now it is the deadline for the decision to be announced. Bracing yourself for disappointment, you let your mind drift to worst-case scenarios.

Because the future is always uncertain, your ability to deal with possible disappointments would seem to be a good quality to develop. Even if you’ve come to believe in the maxim “Expect the worst and hope for the best,” you wonder if it’s really the best strategy. Wouldn’t it be better to take advantage of every moment that brings you closer to a result rather than worrying all the time?

What is reinforcement and why is it bad?

According to a major new study by William Villano and colleagues at the University of Miami (2024), reinforcement consists of a pessimistic and “preemptive response to an uncertain and potentially disappointing outcome.” This happens because “when people lower their expectations, the outcome is less likely to be worse than their new expectations.” The tendency for expectations to drift in a negative direction, however, could lead people to become less able to predict the long-term future. You will be more, not less, likely to be surprised when good or bad results actually occur.

Another problem with preparing for the worst is that it reinforces the tendency to engage in “magical thinking”, or falsely believing that your expectations actually affect the outcomes of events that you do not control. You think it’s bad luck to imagine yourself taking the new job you applied for because you’ll ruin your chances.

All of this raises the question of whether living life expecting poor outcomes impairs your actual ability to anticipate the future through the important vector of learning from the past. People should improve, Villano et al. discuss, about how to adjust their expectations after an event they expected actually happened. Better accuracy should reduce the chance of unpleasant outcomes for events you anticipate and surprises for events you don’t anticipate.

Testing the Bad Effects of Reinforcement

The University of Miami-led research team tested an “expectation drift” model on a sample of 625 undergraduate students who provided ecological momentary assessments (EMAs) throughout a semester while They were taking and waiting for results from at least two of the studies. four consecutive exams in organic chemistry courses.

Course instructors agreed to share exam results with investigators, who then communicated them to students via text message. This way, EMAs could be conducted before and after students received their grades. Throughout the semester, but more frequently before and after exams, students provided EMAs of their positive and negative affect through ratings of a range of emotions that included positive emotions (happy, excited, attentive, relaxed) and negative (upset, irritable, anxious). Students also provided estimates of their expected grades for the next exam, both after the exam and immediately before receiving their grade. This procedure allowed Villano and his colleagues to calculate prediction errors by calculating the difference between actual and expected scores.

Results revealed that students engaged in expectation creep, reducing their predicted future exam grade by 2.74 points in the interval between Exam 1 and Exam 2. Furthermore, well Although the most frequent change over time was 0, of those who drifted, 43 percent did so. so in a negative sense and only 12 percent did it in a positive sense. The effect of negative expectations was even more pronounced for students who lacked trust in their exam score estimates.

Turning towards the emotion On the other side of the equation, students whose mood tended toward the negative during the waiting period were indeed more likely to make pessimistic estimates of their grades. As the authors conclude, “the pessimistic drift may be an emotionally driven response dependent on a person’s affective state during a period of uncertain expectation.”

In terms of results, having pessimistic expectations did serve as a buffer against the emotional damage caused by a poor grade, but only to a certain extent. In the case of extreme disappointment, people who performed more pessimistically performed worse, suggesting that reinforcement “fails to blunt the emotional impact of very unexpected and disappointing upsets (i.e., i.e. worst case). »

Finally, people who engaged in the most pessimistic form of reinforcement became less accurate in their predictions about future test scores. As the authors noted, “the drift of pessimistic expectations may counterintuitively maintain the degree of uncertainty surrounding future outcomes by reducing the fidelity of prediction errors, even as people gain experience “.

Avoiding the Bias of Pessimistic Expectations

You might conclude from the results of this innovative study that, so what, this was just a group of undergraduates facing a normal part of their lives. Your own experiences bear little resemblance to the emotional lives of organic chemistry students. However, the situation they faced was, for them, high-stakes and goal-relevant, as Villano et al. note. Maybe this is more like your own daily battles with uncertainty than you think.

Translating the study’s findings to your own life, you can view the results as showing that when faced with repeated instances of uncertain outcomes, pessimism will only make you less confident rather than more, while dulling your emotions. There may have been a slight buffering effect of pessimism, but when these students were truly wrong, they felt much worse than if they had not prepared for the outcome.

To summarize, The next time you find yourself in a waiting period, findings from the University of Miami suggest that you literally lose your mind about it, or at least not let your expectations drift downward. If the outcome is not what you wanted, use it as a learning tool to improve your actual ability to predict future outcomes. Feeling bad about a disappointment will only make future disappointments more likely. Allow yourself to expect the best, and it just might come true.