Imagine you’re driving and you hear your phone buzz – you’ve got a message.
So, do you read it?
Now in 2016, there were more than 40,000 traffic deaths, a 14% increase over 2014 – the worst
increase in decades.
And experts believe distracted driving is to blame.
But what are your odds of having an accident while you’re holding your phone?
Of course you tell yourself, “this will never happen to me”
It’s not that you can’t understand the odds.
You just think you’re safe thanks to your brain’s natural optimism.
[Brain Craft intro]
Scientists call it the optimism bias.
It is measured as the difference between a person's expectation and the actual outcome.
It means that we tend to predict the future slightly better than it turns out.
We underrate the risk of negative future events, even when we know the statistics.
We tend to think bad things won’t happen to us.
In contrast, we overestimate positive outcomes.
We buy lottery tickets, but don’t think we could get struck by lightning.
We think we are gonna earn a lot in our jobs and finish that home project in just a weekend...but
reality is often less kind than we expect.
Optimism bias is one of the most consistent, common, and unbreakable biases documented
in psychology and studies have seen it in 80 percent of people (and even in rats and
birds!).
Are you an optimist?
What would happen if we were all optimists?
Well, let’s see what optimism really is and whether it’s a good thing to begin with.
Some people maintain a hopeful view and positive expectations of the future even after years
of reality slapping them in the face
The answer lies in the neural process in the brain and how people calculate and update
our predictions using a concept known as “prediction error.”
Prediction error is the difference between the prediction and the outcome.
Our brains are calculating prediction error all the time to learn new things about the
world as they receive new information.
But our brains treat good and bad news slightly differently.
In one study for example, participants were asked to predict their chances of experiencing
80 negative events in the future.
They then saw the statistical likelihoods of those events happening to an average person
and were asked again.
When given good news, people changed their idea about the future risk.
But given bad news, they only slightly changed their predictions.
Scientists think different brain regions calculate prediction errors for good and bad news about
the future.
And the more optimistic a person is, the less efficiently one of these regions codes for
information containing bad news.
So, it is good to have this bias?
And...is it a good to idea to try to be even more optimistic?
It looks like pessimism bias, or expecting the future to be worse than it usually is,
is linked with depressive symptoms.
Studies have found that people who show higher optimism bias score low on depression symptoms.
People who don’t show any optimism are mildly depressed, and those showing a pessimism bias
score high on depression symptoms.
So higher optimism can mean more happiness.
But what would the world would look like if we were all optimists?
You may think that, perhaps, more people would buy lottery tickets instead of doing work
and less people would quit smoking.
Would society still innovate and be prepared for the future if everyone was hopeful, all
the time?
Well, yes, perhaps even more so.
Being optimistic or pessimistic doesn’t make us complacent – it can be the defining
factor in how we approach change.
Having positive expectations for the future is the first step to having any chance in
achieving positive outcomes – to successfully eradicating disease or managing a changing
climate.
In general, psychologists think optimism bias is a good thing to have, even necessary, in
order to reach your goals.
So, stay positive.