myopic misery

We hypothesized a phenomenon that we term myopic misery. According to our hypothesis, sadness increases impatience and creates a myopic focus on obtaining money immediately instead of later. This focus, in turn, increases intertemporal discount rates and thereby produces substantial financial costs….

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the English poet and philosopher, experienced profound bouts of anxiety and depression throughout his life. This life experience may have given rise to his famous phrase “a sadder and a wiser man”.  More recently, beginning with empirical tests of depressive realism (Alloy & Abramson, 1979), hundreds of studies have found support for the sadder-but-wiser hypothesis: Sadness and depression make individuals wiser than nondepressed or happy people. For example, sadness tends to be associated with careful, deliberative, System 2 thought (Kanhenman, 2011) as opposed to heuristic, impulsive System 1 thought (Keltner & Lerner, 2011). Sadness has been shown to reduce a range of otherwise robust cognitive biases, including having overly optimistic views of one’s importance, reputation, and abilities (Alloy & Abramson, 1979); relying on stereotypes (Park & Banaji, 2000); and overattributing causality to individuals (Keltner, Ellsworth, & Edwards, 1993)….

[Yet,] sadness makes one myopic. Although sadness may make people more accurate in some contexts (Alloy & Abramson, 1979), it also makes them prefer immediate gratification – and that preference is not an attribute associated with wisdom….


Jennifer S. Lerner, Ye Li, and Elke U. Weber

“The Financial Cost of Sadness” Association for Psychological Science. 2013