Hot-Cold Empathy Gap

The hot-cold empathy gap is the tendency to underestimate how much a person's own future judgments, preferences and behavior will be shaped by visceral states such as hunger, pain, fear or arousal when that person is not currently experiencing the state in question, so that decisions made in a cold, unaroused condition can differ sharply from the decisions the same person actually makes once in a hot, aroused state. The psychologist George Loewenstein developed and named the concept in research beginning in the late 1990s, drawing on studies showing that people in a cold state systematically underpredict the influence that a hot state, once entered, will have on their own later decisions. The concept is widely applied in health psychology and public policy discussions of behaviors such as addiction relapse and impulsive decision-making, where a cold-state plan can fail to anticipate the pull of a hot state the planner has not yet re-entered.