Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Adam Harris  (University College London) who recently published a paper entitled: " Understanding the coherence of the severity effect and optimism phenomena: Lessons from attention ". The paper appeared in a special issue on the nature and consequences of optimism, guest-edited by Anneli Jefferson, Lisa Bortolotti, and Bojana Kuzmanovic. In this post, Adam (pictured below) offers a precis of his paper. Popular belief maintains that humans are prone to an almost universal optimistic bias, including a tendency to overestimate the likelihood of good outcomes and underestimate the likelihood of bad outcomes. Related research findings include (all references are in the paper [AH1] ): Wishful thinking . For example, estimates of the likelihood of a sports team winning being higher from that team’s supporters than neutral individuals; Unrealistic comparative optimism . People think they are less likely to experience negative events, such as cancer, than...

This post is by Vera Hoorens (Leuven University) who recently wrote a paper entitled, "The Hubris Hypothesis: The Downside of Comparative Optimism Displays" , together with Carolien Van Damme , Marie Helweg-Larsen , and Constantine Sedikides . The paper is to appear in a special issue of Consciousness and Cognition on unrealistic optimism , guest edited by Anneli Jefferson, Lisa Bortolotti, and Bojana Kuzmanovic. Vera Optimism has many positive consequences. This makes one expect that people encourage and admire other individuals’ optimism. We speculated, however, that the extent to which they do so depends on how these individuals display their optimism. They may express absolute optimism, saying that their future will be good, or comparative optimism, saying that their future will be better than other people’s futures. Based on the hubris hypothesis, we predicted that this distinction would determine how observers respond. The hubris hypothesis states that obs...