A University of Florida (UF) psychologist suggests that making that trip for Thanksgiving dinner may be more critical to your future happiness than you realize.
Dr. Erin Westgate leads a team at the UF Social Cognition and Emotion Lab that studies how people evaluate the importance of future life events. The professor’s earlier research found that people frequently undervalue the importance of seemingly minor decisions about their social lives, leading to decreased happiness.
According to new research, that could also apply on holidays like Thanksgiving.
A Chance Conversation Sparks a Question
Universities are places not just for professors to impart their knowledge but also for students to share ideas and challenge one another. That is precisely what happened to Dr. Wesgate when she was a student. “This started a long time ago when I was in grad school where I was talking to another student who asked me if we know how meaningful events will be in the future,” Westgate explained. It was amid the holiday season, coming up on Thanksgiving, prompting her to ask, “Surely people know how significant Thanksgiving will be, right? It’s the poster child for gratitude and meaning.”
Inspired by the conversation, Westgate proceeded to examine the question through research. Her subjects were University of Virginia (UV) undergraduate students. The research process was simple: She asked students about the anticipated significance of their Thanksgiving and followed up afterward to gauge their perceptions of the event.
Westgate’s analysis surprised her, as participants’ initial appraisal of their Thanksgiving’s significance heavily underestimated how meaningful they found the event afterward.
Continuing Research
In 2019, Westgate became an Assistant Professor in the UF Psychology Department. Her work there has primarily been “high-impact lab-based,” but the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns allowed Westgate to pursue other research. She decided to look back at her earlier work on the meaningfulness of Thanksgiving.
“We found it once, but can we find it again,” Westgate wondered.
The second time Westgate researched the question, she was better positioned. The sample of UF undergrads was much larger than the one she collected at UV, yet the result remained the same. The reconfirmed findings pointed to a larger-scale trend: people underestimate how meaningful their Thanksgiving holiday will be.
“We want to live meaningful lives, we want to do meaningful things and so if we are not realizing that an experience is going to be meaningful, we may be less likely to do it and miss out on these potential sources of meaning in our own lives,” Westgate said.
Expanding Fulfillment
Now, Westgate is expanding her research beyond the confines of Thanksgiving into how individuals evaluate the meaning of future events more broadly. The work will examine how people make decisions ranging from small choices such as attending a gathering to majorly life-changing ones like starting a family or career change. Despite the disparity in scale, these choices impact how purposeful and fulfilling an individual finds their life, according to Westgate.
For three years, Westgate will work in the lab and in the field to uncover why people continually underestimate life experiences, both positive and negative. Discomfort will be a key focus area in the new study. The work will investigate how discomfort with a decision impacts resilience and an individual’s satisfaction with personal sacrifice. Westgate hopes that understanding why we undervalue experiences will lead to developing tools for a more meaningful life.
“We don’t make sense of events until they actually happen. We don’t process events until we need to, when they actually happen and not before,” said Westgate. “If we try to make sense of things before they happen, the downside of that is that we are not appreciating how meaningful they will be.”
Ryan Whalen covers science and technology for The Debrief. He holds a BA in History and a Master of Library and Information Science with a certificate in Data Science. He can be contacted at ryan@thedebrief.org, and follow him on Twitter @mdntwvlf.