The Optimism Bias

Our second talk was The Optimism Bias given by Tali Sharot, a neuroscientist from UCL.

The basis of the optimism bias is that people overestimate the positive and underestimate the negative. We think that we will win the lottery, and not not get cancer, that our children will be especially talented, but we won't be in a car accident. The bias is the difference between what we expect and what actually happens. It was coined by Weinstein in 1980.

Tali gave some good examples such as marriage and divorce. When we get married we think that we will definitely not get divorced, and yet the statistics show that almost half of all couples getting married today will not have lasting marriages. Even with experience, people will think it will get better next week and some just keep getting married time after time.

We are more optimistic about ourselves, but less optimistic about others and our country. We also think that we are better than we really are, for example more than 50% of people think they are better than average drivers.

Although most people (80%) have some degree of optimism bias, some people don't, and they tend to be depressed. Those that are more realistic have less of an optimisim bias and are mildly depressed, those that have no optimism bias are very depressed think that all things will turn out bad.

But it isn't only humans that show this bias. They found that some animals such as mice and birds have it, and if they are kept in a cage with no comfort or toys, they get depressed like humans do and stop showing optimistic behaviours.

Interestingly, it is an illusion, because normally when things go wrong we would evaluate and make adjustments with the new information, but somehow we seem to be able to see things as being better than they really were. We pay more attention to the good stuff, and less to the negative.

Tali being a neuroscientist, has used fMRI to find some of the areas of the brain involved. The left Inferior Frontal Gyrus (IFG) responds to good news, and the right IFG to negative things, but the right side shows a weaker response than the left, so people will pay more attention to the positive than the negative.

One of the applications for this is warning signs. People don't take notice of them, they think that it doesn't apply to them. Hence the warning on cigarette packages that “Smoking Kills” probably doesn't work, and would be better if it said something like “80% of people can stopped smoking”

Expectations and anticipation also plays a part. People with high expectations tend to assume that if things go well it was because of something they did, so they will continue to work hard to make things turn out positively. People with low expectations tend to blame themselves and feel worse. This will colour how they see things panning out in the future. We tent to dwell on what is happening now, rather than the future, and the anticipation of something good in the future, like a holiday or a dinner out, might actually be better than the event itself, making us feel happier and more optimistic now.

Optimism can also change both subjective and objective reality. If we expect something to be positive, we will interrupt negative results more positively. But also, if we are expecting something to be positive we may put more effort into making it work out.

Having the optimism bias can be good for our health; optimists think that they have less chance of dying, and are more likely to recover quickly from an illness. They think this is because anxiety and stress are reduced so they can put more effort into recovering.

It can be helpful knowing about the optimism bias, so that we can take precautionary action. It would be wrong to get rid of the bias, it makes more sense to work with it. We can be optimistic that our houses will never burn down, but still take out insurance. We can assume that we will never get divorced, but still sign a pre-nup.

There are wider implications as well, for instance in finance. The reason why the Olympics is not grossly over budget this time is because the Green Book took into account the optimism bias and adjusted the figures accordingly. There is also a believe that the crash of 2008 was caused by the optimism bias.

We all have our own optimism biases. For us I think it was the number of lectures a day that Ram could comfortably handle. He struggled last year, but we still went ahead and booked the same number for this year.

For me, it is this blog. Last year I wanted to blog the festival, and never got as far as writing anything. This year I thought I had learned from that and decided to be strict with myself and write them and blog each day. I still haven't managed it, although I have done better. Will our optimism prevail and result in us booking the same number of talks next year, and will my optimism make me put more effort into keeping this blog up to date? Only time will tell!

For a more detailed look at Tali's work check out this article written by her.