Why are we sometimes overly optimistic?

I remember watching 500 Days of Summer a few weeks ago and boring Jitka about how it's just plain wrong that they didn't get it together.  Of course the men amongst my readers might counter that it's just plain wrong that I was watching such a movie in the first place, but yaboo to you.

I like to think I'm a pretty optimistic kinda guy, but sometimes it can take on the form of unrealistic optimism.  Just as in the film you can be blind to the reality of things, be that with the unrequited love in the movie, or otherwise.  We're much better at imaging happy outcomes than we are sad ones.

Some new research looks to get to the bottom of why we do this.  The researchers had participants estimate the probability of experiencing some 80 various life events.  After they gave this estimation they were given the actual probability of each event happening given their personal circumstances.  Participants were given a chance to re-estimate again later on.

Interestingly people were much more likely to revise their estimate if it was overly pessimistic than if it was overly optimistic.  They literally paid more attention to the positive feedback than to the negative feedback.

The researchers had brain scans setup during each experiment and found that different parts of the brain were used depending on whether the initial estimate was pessimistic or optimistic.  If they were too pessimistic to begin with the frontal lobes saw increased activity.  This increased activity correlated with their subsequent upgrading of their prediction.

In contrast, an overly optimistic prediction resulted in much less brain activity and therefore lower instances of the prediction being updated.
 
"Our findings offer a mechanistic account of how unrealistic optimism persists in the face of challenging information," said Sharot and her team. "We found that optimism was related to diminished coding of undesirable information about the future in a region of the frontal cortex (right inferior frontal gyrus) that has been identified as being sensitive to negative estimation errors."
 
Overly optimistic outlooks on life probably have an evolutionary explanation as they spare us much of the stress and anxiety that comes with bad situations.  Suffice to say of course that burying ones head in the sand is not desirable either, as we're all too well aware of given the financial predicament society currently finds itself in.

Related

Facebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmail

3 thoughts on “Why are we sometimes overly optimistic?

  1. 500 Days is a great movie. Optimism is the way to be, much rather that than miss out on things by being too negative 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Captcha loading...