Occupational Affective Forecasting Bias And Its Cognitive Mechanism

Occupational affective forecasting is the subjective prediction of future events in a career-related context,which is closely related and critical to,but not subordinate to,career decision-making.However,as in other cases,occupational affective forecasting is not always particularly accurate and shows a relatively stable bias.As existing studies have shown that,although the research on affective prediction bias has reached a certain scale,there are relatively few studies focusing on occupational situations,and there are also significant gaps between the research results and the exploration of the impacts of bias is also less relevant to the situation.Therefore,it is necessary to explore the specific performance and cognitive mechanism of occupational affective forecasting bias based on the specificity of occupational situations.To sum up,this study attempts to incorporate some unique factors related to occupational situations(such as occupational participation)into the research of influencing factors of occupational emotion prediction bias through repeated sorting of the field of career decision-making and then investigate the cognitive mechanism of occupational emotion prediction bias from the particularity of occupational situations.In this paper,we focus on five studies to investigate the specific performance and cognitive mechanisms of occupational affective forecasting bias.The processing system,information evaluability,and focusing illusion are manipulated variables in this paper.Study 1 examined the specific performance of individuals’ occupational affective forecasting bias,varying across work types;Study 2 and Study 3 attempted to explore the role of dual-processing system and information evaluability,which were the two major cognitive factors in occupational affective forecasting bias;Study 4and 5,which were parallel to each other,attempted to incorporate focusing illusion into the cognitive model found above,mainly comparing the differences and similarities of cognitive mechanisms of individuals’ occupational affective forecasting bias across information relevance and information irrelevance conditions.Specifically:In Study 1,different real occupations were used as survey situations to observe the individual’s performance of emotion prediction bias on specific occupational emotion(i.e.,vocational interest and occupational satisfaction).The present study consisted of two experiments.Experiment 1a investigated the kindergarten principals whose occupation is one of the traditional occupations,and Experiment 1b investigated the online writer whose occupation is one of the post-modern professions.The results showed that real-world workers were stably overestimating their future career-related emotions.The results showed that the occupational affective forecasting bias was not affected by work types and discrete emotion types.Study 2 used occupational engagement as an outcome indicator to investigate the impact of available information on occupational affective forecasting bias and then explored its underlying cognitive mechanisms.This study included two experiments(the sample is the same as that of Study I).Experiment 2 and Experiment 3 respectively examined whether the information evaluability(i.e.,occupational engagement)affected occupational affective forecasting bias of individuals across work types(the kindergarten principals vs.the online writer)and discussed the mediating role of predicted and experienced emotions according to the information availability model.The results showed that,only for the kindergarten principals,their occupational engagement could significantly affect the accuracy of the occupational affective forecasting process,and this effect did not appear as the dependent variables were satisfaction,which meant the mechanism of occupational affective forecasting bias in kindergarten principals was different from that of online writers.In Study 3,different paradigms were used to manipulate individuals’ analytical or intuitive thinking to investigate the effect of dual-processing systems on occupational affective forecasting bias and explore its basic cognitive mechanism.The study consisted of three experiments.Experiment 4 replicated and improved the classic research of Motl et al.by adopting the rational/intuitive thinking priming task to examine the effect of pre-decision strategies on affective forecasting;Experiment 5 used the verbal fluency task to prime the rational/intuitive processing system and examined the influence of pre-decision strategies on affective forecasting,attempting to observe whether the results varied across paradigms.Experiment 6 used the information board method to measure individual retrieval patterns and classify them into self-generated,pre-decision strategy groups(rational/intuitive processing systems).The results showed that occupational engagement could inform the prediction process of vocational interests,while the facilitation of the processing system was not stable.In addition,there were interaction effects between the two variables.This suggested that the role of pre-decision strategies depended on increased processing depths brought by processing methods,and this internal mechanism also promotes the effect of occupational engagement.Study 4 used attention inhibition and attention allocation tasks to manipulate attention focus,aiming to explore the role of attention focus on the cognitive mechanism of occupational affective forecasting bias under information-relevant conditions.This study included three experiments,experiment 7 and experiment 8 used 2(Inhibition mode: yes vs.no)× 2(Information evaluability: high vs.low)mixed design.Among them,inhibition mode was between subjects,and the distinction between inhibition groups and non-inhibition groups was information materials amounts achieved through different presentation methods.In Experiment 7,inhibition conditions were manipulated as inhibition of existing knowledge and beliefs caused by priming rational thinking;In Experiment 8,the inhibition condition was manipulated as the inhibition effect of priming intuitive thinking.Experiment 9 adopted 2(Inhibition mode: high vs.low)× 2(Information Type: Center vs.Edge)× 2(Information evaluability: high vs.low).The results again found that the evaluability of information had a significant impact on affective forecasting bias,and there was an interaction between processing methods and information types,suggesting that the logic chain of "processing mode-processing depth-focusing" was able to be established.In Study 5,to investigate the cognitive mechanism of occupational affective forecasting bias under the information-irrelevant condition,the basic idea and experimental design were parallel to Study 4,including three experiments.The only difference between Study 4 and 5was that the situational materials used in Study 5 were irrelevant information,which was obtained through various ways(such as interviews,online text analysis,etc.)and determined through specific information relevance ratings.The results showed that the direction of bias and the role of factors under this condition was fundamentally contrary to the results in Study4,indicating that the processing mechanism of occupational affective forecasting bias under information-relevant conditions and information-irrelevant conditions was not consistent.To sum up,this paper systematically investigated the specific performance and cognitive mechanism of occupational affective forecasting bias through the above five studies.The conclusions are as follows:(1)The bias of occupational affective forecasting exists stably,but there are both overestimations and underestimations.The direction of bias depends on the characteristics of specific situations or the information characteristics of to-be-predicted events.(2)The evaluability of information has a stable impact on occupational affective forecasting bias,which exists throughout the whole process and can work together with other factors.(3)The core cause of the occupational affective forecasting bias is not the processing mode but the focusing illusion.Specifically,there is an active path from processing mode to processing depth,even to focusing.(4)The correction effect of processing mode on the occupational affective forecasting bias comes from its effect on the importance(weight)of information.Generally speaking,it can be achieved not only by restraining individuals’ over-focus on the central information but also by appropriately increasing focus on the non-central information.(5)The above conclusions can only be used to explain the cognitive mechanism of occupational affective forecasting bias under information-relevant conditions,and the impact mechanism under information-irrelevant conditions is absolutely opposite to this.