Social Category Information Biases Affective Forecasts

One part of interacting with others is being able to predict and anticipate their future emotional states—that is, make affective forecasts for them. For example, the way in which people classify interrogation methods as acceptable or as torture depends on their capacity to imagine the pain induced by such techniques. Typically, providing forecasters with more amounts of information can help them generate more accurate forecasts. Instead, we find that providing forecasters with targets’ group membership information causes them to make less accurate forecasts compared to when they have no such access to this information because they adjust in the wrong direction to account for this additional information.