How unrealistic optimism is maintained in the face of reality

By Tali Sharot, Christoph W. Korn, R. J. Dolan. Nature Neuroscience, 2011

615 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Unrealistic optimism is a pervasive human trait that influences domains ranging from personal relationships to politics and finance. How people maintain unrealistic optimism, despite frequently encountering information that challenges those biased beliefs, is unknown. We examined this question and found a marked asymmetry in belief updating. Participants updated their beliefs more in response to information that was better than expected than to information that was worse. This selectivity was mediated by a relative failure to code for errors that should reduce optimism. Distinct regions of the prefrontal cortex tracked estimation errors when those called for positive update, both in individuals who scored high and low on trait optimism. However, highly optimistic individuals exhibited reduced tracking of estimation errors that called for negative update in right inferior prefrontal gyrus. These findings indicate that optimism is tied to a selective update failure and diminished neural coding of undesirable information regarding the future.

Subfields: Applied Psychology, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b0c6384682c16fd775f6980dced5d0ebee4405b6

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Citations in the corpus

Good news and bad news are still news: experimental evidence on belief updating (2019, positive): “In an unincentivized study, Sharot et al. (2011) examined how individuals updated their beliefs about future life events such as being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease or being robbed.”
What Does It Mean to be Biased: Motivated Reasoning and Rationality (2014, background): “…although given that sources for these statistics include the Office for National Statistics, it is unlikely that University College London research participants (e.g., Sharot et al., 2011) constitute a representative sample of the general population from which that estimate was devised.”
Hierarchical Active Inference: A Theory of Motivated Control (2018, background): “, the belief that preferred outcomes are being realized [59]).”
Toward a Neurobiology of Unrealistic Optimism (2012, background): “Most recently, attention has turned to investigating the neural underpinnings of this phenomenon (Sharot et al., 2007, 2011).”
The Economics of Motivated Beliefs (2015, background): “Sharot et al. (2012) confirm the general finding of asymmetric updating to good and bad news and show that distinct regions of the prefrontal cortex are involved in tracking estimation errors that call for positively vs.”
The Dynamics of Motivated Beliefs (2020, background): “Implications have been studied in diverse contexts such as (over)confidence (see, e.g., Bénabou and Tirole, 2002; Kőszegi, 2006; Sharot et al., 2011), moral behavior (see, e.”