We’re down on Obama because we’re easily disappointed or something

There’s no question that the president has failed to live up to the expectations of many of his supporters–expectations he created with his empyrean campaign rhetoric. But it turns out that human beings are easy to disappoint. Research suggests that even when people know that someone has nothing but bad options to choose from, they still blame the decider for a bad outcome. And while disappointment and regret and even anger are often spoken about in similar terms, psychologists see them as distinct emotions, triggered by different sorts of events and motivating us to act in different ways. Even disappointment itself comes in flavors: Being disappointed with a person feels different from being disappointed with an outcome, and demands a different response…

”People forget over time what they expected, and their counterfactual tends to get rosier and rosier over time,” says George Loewenstein, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University. ”Obama is being judged by a rising disappointment standard, so people are really disappointed, [even though] if right in the middle of the financial crisis they had been told how things were going to turn out they would have been thrilled.”