If you’ve ever had something really bad or really good happen to you, you’re already familiar with the process of affective forecasting. When faced with what we interpret as an important event, we will necessarily try to predict how it will affect us emotionally.

False predictions are a result of the cognitive impact bias that leads us to vastly overestimate the long-term effect of any significant event. If you think the world is over because you’ve lost your job or broken up with your significant other, it most certainly isn’t.

The impact bias easily translates to a collective level, and it results in overreaction to local news and events. The recent hype about the bar in the Harper Center is a textbook example of the impact bias on a communal stage.

Not much is known for sure about this bar. We can assume it will be expensive and will definitely have strict security policies. As for the concern with promoting binge or underage drinking, we need only look a few blocks north to know the real impact of having a bar on or near campus.

There has never been an incident with the Bluejay Bar & Grill. It’s just as close as the Harper Center to the freshman and sophomore dorms and is packed with students and alumni after basketball games, just like the Harper Center bar is intended to be.

When this bar first became certified there were probably the same old apprehensions about its effect on students’ drinking. Undoubtedly, predictions about its impact on campus life were considerably exaggerated.

Will the bar in the Harper Center increase underage or binge drinking? Not likely. Will it encourage safer drinking? Probably not. The impact bias has us wasting time debating something that will not matter in the long run. We already know what it’s like to have a bar within close proximity of campus, and it has proven to have a negligible effect on the university as a whole. The new bar will probably be like any other venue on campus. It will be a nice addition, but imagining its effect beyond that is useless speculation.

Impact biases typically result in nothing more than endless cycles of trying and failing to predict the future. It can be fun and even constructive to imagine how we’ll feel about certain events such as winning a race or meeting a celebrity, but predicting how something as commonplace as a bar will affect our livelihood, where’s the fun in that? It is almost always better to rid ourselves of this bias and interpret events as they really are, not what we want or think they will be.