Lowering Expectations Increases Happiness and Satisfaction

Lowering Expectations Increases Happiness and Satisfaction
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Abstract
The research proposal discusses one strategy for avoiding disappointment: decreasing one’s expectations for getting a desired albeit uncertain result. It is predicted that individuals will accept this method when two particular (contextual) criteria are satisfied. When they expect self-relevant feedback, and secondly when they expect this feedback to come soon. This hypothesis will be supported by an experiment manipulating the self-relevance and feedback timing regarding the outcome. The expected findings indicate that participants reduced their estimations of their test score only when feedback regarding it is self-relevant and imminent. The implications and usefulness of using this method are examined briefly. The article suggests that by decreasing expectations, one might prevent disappointments raising their happiness and satisfaction levels.
Lowering Expectations Increases Happiness and Satisfaction
Nowadays, people are feeling more pressure and stress during their daily life. Even those who have a stable life routine would also feel bored and stressed after a long time. People are starting to care less about themselves and receive more worries from the outside world, such as jobs, family, and social interaction. However, these are the factors that are hard to change. People cannot change their social status like switching TV channels. However, what can be changed is the mental process, thoughts, and people’s ideas, in order to create more happiness and satisfaction in daily life. I believe that lowering our expectations on something can help us achieve more happiness and satisfaction, such that if things do not come the expected way, it should not be disappointing.
Previous research has stated the elements that make people feel stressed or unsatisfied in their daily life. For instance, Qin et al. (2018) show that people, especially young workers in society, have intense depression and stress levels from health conditions, educational levels, and personal income. The authors take the individual life satisfaction level as the dependent variable and personal, family, and social characteristic factors as the independent variables. Using interviews and graphs to collect responses from the participants, they show that people of different ages and statuses are influenced mainly by the amount of income, which allows them to handle different emergency or needful situations. At the same time, life satisfaction is also influenced by people’s educational level. Research shows that those who received higher education usually have less anxiety about the future and job considerations (Zhang et al., 2022).
Previous research also found that psychological elements provide positive emotions which increase life satisfaction and build ego resilience through daily self-monitoring and encouragement (Cohn et al., 2009). The article collects data by using websites that let participants submit their daily emotion reports and using a 4-point Likert scale to collect data from resilience (as the dependent variable) and a 7-point Likert scale from life satisfaction (as the independent variable). The article shows that positive feelings and ego resilience are linked to rising life satisfaction levels and proves that building strong ego resilience through daily life can increase happiness.
Previous research also proved that lower expectations could increase happiness by increasing the chances of a positive surprise (Morrison, 2021). However, the article cautions that constantly lowering expectations can also lead to an unhappy situation. Researchers used gambling games to test participants’ mental processes, where happiness was the dependent variable and expectation of winning the pool was the independent variable. They found out that wealth accumulation is not the element that makes people happy. However, the potential amount that people can get from unexpected winnings is the key element for participants to feel more happiness (Knapton, 2014).
Individuals may essentially adopt two distinct ways to prevent disappointment. Firstly, they may adjust the outcome to conform to their expectations. Secondly, people may adjust their expectations in response to a predicted (less favorable) outcome. The first approach is often complicated and time-consuming to implement. Naturally, individuals will make every effort to achieve the desired objective. However, results are often contingent on various variables, some of which might be beyond their control. As a result, achieving the intended output is often difficult. The second approach that individuals might use to minimize disappointment is to adjust their expectations to reflect a lower-than-expected result. This study will be based on this second approach.  This method, I believe, might be more simply implemented. Thus, when individuals worry that their expectations have exceeded the likelihood of achieving the desired result, they may seek to prevent disappointment by proactively lowering their expectations towards achieving the desired end.
In this essay, I hypothesize that individuals avoid disappointment, thus increasing happiness and satisfaction by decreasing their expectations for achieving a desirable goal. By lowering initial expectations, the likelihood of suffering disappointment is decreased. The lower the expectations, the less likely they will surpass the actual result, and hence the less likely they would be disappointed. Additionally, I propose that individuals use this method when they anticipate being presented with self-relevant feedback in the near future. When individuals are not presented with self-relevant feedback (when they get no feedback or get irrelevant feedback), there is no potential for a mismatch between their expectations and the outcome. Hence, there is no prospect of feeling disappointment or an incentive to decrease expectations. Additionally, when they do not expect feedback soon, there is no immediate danger of disappointment; thus, people see no need to adjust expectations. Without an immediate risk of disappointment, individuals have no need to decrease their expectations. In summary, I predict that reducing expectations is motivated only by the need to avoid disappointment when self-relevant input regarding a favorable result is expected in the near future.
Method
Design
To test the hypothesis above, I will perform an experiment where psychology students will take a test that has been characterized as a strong future success predictor in a psychology profession (self-relevant) or law enforcement (self-irrelevant). Half of the participants will be informed that their test scores will be available immediately after the experiment  (immediate feedback). The other half will be informed that their result will be available in around two weeks (delayed feedback). Participants will estimate their test scores at two stages during the session. Time 1 will be immediately upon task completion, and Time 2 will be at the session’s conclusion. Time 2 will be for immediate feedback condition participants who believe they will get feedback on their test scores shortly before receiving it.  For the delayed feedback condition participants, Time 2 is still around two weeks before getting feedback on their test results. I anticipate that only participants who get self-relevant immediate feedback will have lower expectations for their test scores.  More precisely, I anticipate that the self-relevant and immediate feedback condition participants will significantly reduce their Time 1 to Time 2 estimate ratings than individuals in the other three scenarios (self-relevant and delayed condition; self-irrelevant and immediate condition; self-irrelevant and delayed condition).
Participants
The research will include 80 psychology students and be conducted as part of a broader test session that includes two unrelated experiments. Participants will be assigned to individual cubicles. They will be randomly allocated to one of the factorial design’s conditions: self-relevant and immediate feedback condition; self-relevant and delayed condition; self-irrelevant and immediate condition; self-irrelevant and delayed condition. The measurement time will be a factor that varies across participants. Each condition will have twenty participants. All selected students must be currently enrolled in or have previously enrolled in a psychology program.
Procedures and Measures
The participants will be informed that the session will comprise three independent studies. Participants will be given a ‘career questionnaire’ at the start of the session, which will have two pertinent questions “How critical is it for you to find a job in psychology?” and “How critical is it for you to find a career in law enforcement?” The participants will answer both questions by putting a mark anywhere on a 100 mm length labeled “not at all” at the 0 mark on the scale and “very much” at the 100 mark. In the next task, participants will be given an ‘intuitive intelligence test’, which, unlike the name suggests, is a test developed specifically for this research, consisting of items drawn from various other IQ tests.
Participants in the self-relevant experiment conditions will be informed that research indicates a strong association between an intuitive intelligence test score and psychology career success. Those in the self-irrelevant experiment conditions will be informed that the test was designed for lawyers. Additionally, participants in the immediate feedback conditions will be informed that they will get their test ...