Anticipation

People can and often do anticipate their future experiences and emotions. From the perspective of anticipatory behaviour, Glasersfeld (in Butz, Sigaud, and Gérard, 2003b) notes that “on the conceptual level, to anticipate means to project into what lies ahead a mental representation abstracted from past experience” (p. v).

Authorities agree that individuals can learn to anticipate the consequences of certain

events or acts by reflecting on previous and current experiences (Baumeister, Vohs, DeWall, and Zhang, 2007; Glasersfeld, 1998). This is based on the belief that the experiential world exhibits some regularity, allowing one to anticipate that things will work in the future in the same way that they have worked in the past (Glasersfeld in Butz, et al., 2003b). Here, as suggested by Glasersfeld (1998), three types of anticipation are involved:

1. Anticipation as the implicit expectations that are a precondition in various actions (e.g. when walking down a stairway in the dark).

2. Anticipation in the form of an expectation of a particular future experience, which is created by observing a current situation.

3. Anticipation of a desired goal, event, or situation, along with the effort to achieve it by creating its cause.

With respect to this study, the second and third forms of anticipation are relevant to the context of anticipated user experience.

It has been suggested that anticipation contributes to current behaviour. Baumeister et al. (2007) posit that people often make decisions, select their actions, and adjust their behaviour according to anticipated emotions that are based on the combination of past emotional outcomes and present affect. As they learn to anticipate response (e.g. future emotions), they might change their behaviour to pursue the desired response or to circumvent the undesirable one (Baumeister, et al., 2007). Huron (2006), however, argues that anticipating an outcome evokes specific emotions, and it is these current emotions that may motivate behavioural adjustments that can increase the possibility of future favourable outcomes. In both views, the altered behaviour is deemed to produce constructive results. As an illustration, a student anticipating the sadness of failing his exams may be encouraged to study harder; this encouragement and this effort, in turn, help him to actually pass the exams. In view of this phenomenon, the anticipation of emotional outcomes may be more important in guiding behaviour than the actual, felt emotion (Baumeister, et al., 2007).

Related to the notion that anticipation influences and guides behaviour, Butz, Sigaud, and Gérard (2003a) define anticipatory behaviour as “a process, or behavior, that does not only depend on past and present but also on predictions, expectations, or

beliefs about the future” (p. 3). Thus, anticipation is not simply a mere thought about the future, but is about the impact of an expectation or prediction on actual, present behaviour (Butz, et al., 2003a). It is asserted that people modify their behaviour according to predictions or expectations of a future event, and this behaviour includes “actual decision making, internal decision making, internal preparatory mechanisms, as well as learning” (Butz, et al., 2003a, p. 1).

Anticipation can also have a significant impact on current emotion and subjective well-being. When imagining results of a future event, one can palpably experience positive or negative emotions, as if those results have already occurred (Huron, 2006). The emotions elicited by anticipation involve five functionally different physiological systems: imagination, tension, prediction, reaction, and appraisal (Huron, 2006). These emotions, which are referred to as ‘anticipatory affects’

(MacLeod and Conway, 2005), contribute, in turn, to current welfare. As Elster and Loewenstein (1992) argue, individuals are able to derive positive utility from anticipating favourable events, and to sustain negative emotional consequences from anticipating future undesirable experiences; thus, people can repetitively experience the hedonic effect of future events before they actually take place. Likewise, MacLeod and Conway (2005) note that anticipation of positive future experiences is an important element of current subjective well-being; that is, thinking about experiencing pleasurable future outcomes (e.g. achieving personally meaningful goals) generates good feelings (e.g. happiness).

Besides anticipation, retrospection can affect present emotions (Elster and Loewenstein, 1992; Norman, 2009; van Boven and Ashworth, 2007). However, van Boven and Ashworth (2007) find that anticipation is more evocative than retrospection. Their study demonstrates that people tend to have more intense emotions when anticipating, than when remembering emotional experiences that are positive, negative, routine, and purely hypothetical. It is also identified that the imagination of a hypothetical future experience generates about the same intensity of current emotion as the anticipation of an actual future experience (van Boven and Ashworth, 2007). The fact that anticipation engenders greater emotional arousal than retrospection can be caused by discrepancies between the ways people think about future and past experiences. First, people tend to expect that they will experience

more extreme emotions during future events than the emotions they remember experiencing during past events. Second, people tend to mentally simulate future experiences more extensively than they simulate past experiences (van Boven and Ashworth, 2007). The former phenomenon is specifically explored in the areas of affective forecasting and rosy prospection.

Wilson and Gilbert’s (2003, 2005) studies of affective forecasting – people’s expectations about their emotional responses to future events – demonstrate that people typically show an impact bias; that is, they anticipate their future emotional reactions to be more intense and enduring than they actually turn out to be. In other words, they overestimate the intensity and duration of their emotional responses to future experiences. Similarly, the theory of rosy prospection (Mitchell, Thompson, Peterson, and Cronk, 1997) suggests that people’s expectations of personally meaningful events are more positive and enjoyable than the actual experiences when they occur.

The first cause of the impact bias is focalism : people’s tendency to overestimate how much attention will be given to a future focal event, and the tendency to underestimate the effects of other future events on their thoughts and feelings (Wilson and Gilbert, 2005; Wilson, Wheatley, Meyers, Gilbert, and Axsom, 2000).

This is in line with the notion of focusing illusion (Schkade and Kahneman, 1998), which indicates that a focus on the core attributes of future experiences at the expense of other attributes leads to an exaggeration of the perceived effects of these core attributes. The second cause is people’s ignorance of how readily they will make sense of novel experiences at the time of their occurrence (Wilson and Gilbert, 2005). One of the forms of this ignorance is immune neglect, where people are unaware of their psychological immune system that combats threats to affective well-being; thus, they fail to anticipate how quickly they will psychologically cope with negative future events in a way that speeds their emotional recovery (Gilbert, Pinel, Wilson, Blumberg, and Wheatley, 1998).

All phenomena pertaining to anticipation discussed above are believed to apply to users’ anticipation of future experiences with products. Because anticipation affects current behaviour, emotion, and well-being, it can also influence users in selecting and purchasing a product, in interacting with the product, and in perceiving their

experiences with it. Thus, the projection of user experience based on anticipation can be useful information that supports user experience assessment in the early stages of product design. The fact that anticipation is more evocative than retrospection, and the tendency of future experiences to be mentally simulated more extensively than past experiences, adds to the value of anticipation in supporting the early assessment of user experience. In addition, the finding that people anticipate future experiences to be more intense and durable than they actually turn out to be can inspire designers to design products that exceed users’ expectations. Designers could, for example, provide numerous novel features that surprise users, and offer ‘limitless’ possibilities for them to discover and explore during their use of the product.