Take the Belief Update Task, in which Sharot and her colleagues would present participants with 80 or so unsavory life events, like a domestic burglary or getting kidney stones. Participants would then estimate the likelihood of their experiencing such a thing themselves. Then they’d be told of the real-life statistical chances. Afterward, they’re asked to estimate the likelihood again — and inevitably, participants would amend their original estimate more with good news (that kidney stones, for instance, were less likely than they first thought) than when they get bad news (that the kidney stones are more likely). For most people, she says, this is because the brain is actively regulating the reception of negative information. Even more intriguing: People whose brains have more white-matter connections between areas related to inhibition and error-monitoring and areas related to emotion and motivation would be more extreme in the way they discounted bad news and readily received good news.
It helps to explain “illusory superiority,” the humbling and pervasive psychological finding where people think they’re better than they are at just about everything, whether it’s driving, their own attractiveness, making moral judgments, or knowing what makes a joke funny or a food healthy to eat.
The optimism bias makes evolutionary sense, she says, since it reduces anxiety and gets people exploring their worlds and living healthier lives. Your ancestors were your ancestors because at least in part they were optimistic (while also a bit anxious). When I asked about whether one can be rightly optimistic about national politics in the U.S. or U.K., she simply said no: It’s like the financial markets — one person can only make small changes. From that perspective, you might be better suited to deploy your optimism at a hyperlocal level, like your goals for personal growth, fitness, and the like. But civic change, as the long arc of history will tell you, does have a way of bubbling up.
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