Optimism is the belief that what you want to happen will happen.Īnd the optimism bias is the error that we make. Some people say the 2008 financial collapse is related to an optimism bias, when people were underestimating the dangers of the financial market. If you underestimate risk, you might not go to a medical screening or buy insurance. So if I have plans this weekend for a great ski outing, that will affect my happiness today. One thing that really affects our happiness is not necessarily what we're doing in the moment, but what we believe will happen in the future. People who have positive expectations live longer and get over illnesses quicker because they have less stress. It's also related to better physical health. If you have these positive expectations, it’s actually related to better mental health and reduced anxieties. TS: The optimism bias is the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of positive events happening in your life - such as professional success or having talented kids or a happy marriage - and underestimating the likelihood of negative events such as divorce, cancer and accidents. ![]() This can happen within minutes or even seconds. So if you put them in dangerous situations and put them under stress, they suddenly become hyper-vigilant and no longer have an optimism bias. It's not that people are always optimistic. So that would suggest something that you call hardwired.īut what we found recently is in fact even better than that. There are quite sophisticated designs and paradigms to look at different kinds of species - from bees to pigs and birds - that show they have positive expectations. We see the optimism bias in different individuals and different cultures and also in non-human animals. On the one hand, we believe that humans have evolved to be optimistic. These transcript highlights have been edited for brevity and clarity. "To the Best of Our Knowledge" executive producer Steve Paulson asked about her groundbreaking research on the optimism bias. Sharot is a professor of cognitive, perceptual and brain sciences at University College London. It turns out our brains are hungry for positive feedback. There was less precise encoding of negative information in the brain’s frontal lobes. ![]() So she scanned the brains of her subjects and discovered that people learn less from unexpected negative news than positive news. Sharot had accidentally stumbled on what’s known as "the optimism bias" - the belief that our future will be better than our past or present.īut no one knew the neural mechanisms that generated this optimism bias. That "mistake" would guide a different sort of insight into how we're wired to survive - through optimism. ![]() "For example, I would say, 'Imagine the breakup of a relationship,' and someone would say, 'I broke up with my girlfriend and then I found a better one.' This was quite upsetting because it ruined my experiment," Sharot said. They would rather see their own future through rose-tinted glasses. Sharot discovered that most people don’t want to think about bad things that could happen to them. "In fact, we have this system in the brain not in order to remember the past, but mostly to be able to imagine the future, in order to plan ahead," she told " To the Best of Our Knowledge." And then she learned something surprising: the same parts of the brain we use for memory, including the hippocampus, are also used to imagine the future. in psychology and neuroscience, she wanted to know how people remember traumatic events, so she studied the neural mechanisms that cause negative emotions. Tali Sharot never expected to become the science guru of optimism.
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