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Optimism bias or optimistic bias is a cognitive bias that causes someone to believe that they themselves are less likely to experience a negative event. It is also known as unrealistic optimism or comparative optimism. It is common and transcends gender, ethnicity, nationality, and age. [1] Autistic people are less susceptible to this kind of ...
Josiah Stamp is often given credit for introducing it in a 1935 speech, but although he did help to popularize it, a variant regarding a car's gas tank occurs in print with the optimism/pessimism connotations as early as 1929, and the glass-with-water version is mentioned simply as an intellectual paradox about the quantity of water (without ...
The Pollyanna principle (also called Pollyannaism or positivity bias) is the tendency for people to remember pleasant items more accurately than unpleasant ones. [1] Research indicates that at the subconscious level, the mind tends to focus on the optimistic; while at the conscious level, it tends to focus on the negative.
Dispositional optimism and pessimism are typically assessed by asking people whether they expect future outcomes to be beneficial or negative (see below). [9] The LOT returns separate optimism and pessimism scores for each individual. Behaviourally, [clarification needed] these two scores correlate around r=0.5.
Pessimism bias: The tendency for some people, especially those with depression, to overestimate the likelihood of negative things happening to them. (compare optimism bias) Present bias: The tendency of people to give stronger weight to payoffs that are closer to the present time when considering trade-offs between two future moments. [110]
Pessimists tend to focus on the negatives of life in general. A common question asked to test for pessimism is "Is the glass half empty or half full?"; in this situation, a pessimist is said to see the glass as half empty, or in extreme cases completely empty, while an optimist is said to see the glass as half full. Throughout history, the ...
To test this theory, Perloff and Fetzer asked participants to compare themselves to specific comparison targets like a close friend, and found that illusory superiority decreased when they were told to envision a specific person rather than vague constructs like "the average peer".
Pessimism, on the other hand, is much more common; pessimists are more likely to give up in the face of adversity or to suffer from depression. Seligman invites pessimists to learn to be optimists by thinking about their reactions to adversity in a new way. The resulting optimism—one that grew from pessimism—is a learned optimism.