The optimism bias Tali Sharot

I’m gonna talk to you about optimism or

more precisely the optimism bias it’s a

cognitive illusion that we’ve been

studying in my lab for the past few

years and 80% of us have it

it’s our tendency to overestimate our

likelihood of experiencing good events

in our lives and underestimates our

likelihood of experiencing bad events so

we underestimate a likelihood of

suffering from cancer being a car

accident we overestimate our longevity

our career prospects in short we’re more

optimistic than realistic but we are

oblivious to the fact take marriage for

example in the Western world divorce

rates are about 40% that means that out

of five married couples two will end up

splitting their assets but when you ask

newlyweds about their own likelihood of

divorce they estimated at 0% and even

divorced lawyers who should really know

better hugely underestimates

their own likelihood of divorce so it

turns out that optimists are not less

likely to divorce but they are more

likely to remarried in the words of

Samuel Johnson remarriage is a tribe of

Hope over experience

so if we’re married we’re more likely to

have kids and we all think our kids will

be especially talented this by the way

is my two-year-old nephew guy and I just

want to make it absolutely clear that

he’s a really bad example of the

optimism bias because he is in fact

uniquely talented and I’m not alone out

of four British people free said that

they were optimistic about the future of

their own families that’s seventy five

percent but only thirty percent said

that they thought families in general

are doing better than a few generations

ago and this is a really important point

because we’re optimistic about ourselves

we’re optimistic about our kids we’re

optimistic about our families but we’re

not so optimistic about the guy sitting

next to us and we’re somewhat

pessimistic about the faith of our

fellow citizens and the fate of our

country but private optimism about our

own personal future remains persistent

and it doesn’t mean that we think things

will just like magically turn out okay

but rather that we have the unique

ability to make itself now I’m a

scientist I do experiments so to show

you what I mean I’m gonna do an

experiment here with you okay so I’m

gonna give you a list of abilities and

characteristics and I want you to think

for each of these abilities where you

stand relative to the rest of the

population the first one is getting

along well with others who here believes

they’re at the bottom 25%

okay that’s about ten people out of 1500

I think who believes they’re at the top

25% that’s most of us here okay now do

the same for your driving ability how

interesting are you how attractive are

you how honest are you and finally how

modest are you

so most of us put ourselves above

average on most of these abilities now

this is statistically impossible we

can’t all be better than everyone else

but if we believe we’re better than the

other guy well that means that we’re

more likely to get that promotion to

remain married because we’re more social

more interesting and it’s a global

phenomena the optimism bias has been

observed in many different countries in

Western cultures and non-western

cultures and females and males and kids

in the elderly it’s quite widespread but

the question is is it good for us so

some people say no some people say the

secret to happiness is low expectations

I think the logic is something like this

if we don’t expect greatness if we don’t

expect to find love and be healthy and

successful but we’re not gonna be

disappointed when these things don’t

happen and if we’re not disappointed

when good things don’t happen and we’re

pleasantly surprised when they do we

will be happy so it’s a very good theory

but it turns out to be wrong for three

reasons number one whatever happens

whether you succeed or you fail people

with high expectations always feel

better because how we feel when we get

dumped or when employee of the month

depends on how we interpret that event

the psychologists Margaret Marshall and

John Brown studied students with high

and low expectations and they found that

doing people with high expectations

succeeds they attribute that success to

their own traits I am a genius

therefore I got an A therefore I’ll get

an A again and again in the future

when they failed it wasn’t because they

were dumb but because the exam just

happened to be unfair next time they

will do better people with low

expectations did the opposite so when

they failed it was because they were

dumb and when they succeeded it was

because the exam just happened to be

really easy next time reality would

catch up with them so they felt worse

number two regardless of the outcome

the pure act of anticipation makes us

happy the behavioral economist Georg

Lowenstein asked students including

university to imagine getting a

passionate kiss from a celebrity any

celebrity then he said how much are you

willing to pay to get a kiss from a

celebrity if the kiss was delivered

immediately in three hours in 24 hours

in three days in one year in 10 years he

found that the students were willing to

pay the most not to get a kiss

immediately but to get a kiss in three

days they were willing to pay extra in

order to wait now they weren’t willing

to wait a year or ten years I mean no

one wants an aging celebrity but three

days seemed to be the optimum amount so

why is that well if you get the kiss now

it’s over and done with but if you get

the kiss in three days well that’s three

days of jittery anticipation the thrill

of the wait the students wanted that

time to imagine where is it gonna happen

how is it going to happen anticipation

made them happy this is by the way why

people prefer Friday to Sunday it’s a

really curious fact because Friday is a

day of work and Sunday is a day of

pleasure so you would assume that people

will prefer Sunday but they don’t it’s

not because they really really like

being in the office and they can’t stand

strolling in the park or having a lazy

brunch we know that because when you ask

people about their ultimate favorite day

of the week

surprise surprise Saturday comes in at

first then Friday

then Sunday people prefer Friday because

Friday brings with it the anticipation

of the weekend ahead all the plans that

you have on Sunday the only thing you

can look forward to is the workweek

so optimists are people who expect more

kisses in their future more strolls in

the park and that anticipation enhances

their well-being in fact without the

optimism bias we would all be slightly

depressed people with mild depression

they don’t have a

when they look into the future they’re

actually more realistic than people

healthy individuals but individuals with

severe depression they have a

pessimistic bias so they tend to expect

the future to be worse than it ends up

being so optimism changes subjective

reality the way we expect the world to

be changes the way we see it but it also

changes objective reality it acts as a

self-fulfilling prophecy and that is a

third reason why lowering your

expectations will not make you happy

controlled experiments have shown that

optimism is not only related to success

it leads to success optimism leads to

success in academia and sports and

politics and maybe the most surprising

benefit of optimism is health if we

expect the future to be bright stress

and anxiety are reduced so oh no

optimism has lots of benefits but the

question that was really confusing to me

was how do we maintain optimism in the

face of reality as a neuroscientist this

was especially confusing because

according to all the theories out there

when your expectations are not met you

should lter them but this is not what we

find we asked people to come into our

lab in order to try and figure out what

was going on we asked them to estimate

their likelihood of experiencing

different terrible events in their lives

so for example what is your likelihood

of suffering from cancer and then we

told them the average likelihood of

someone like them to suffer these

misfortunes so cancer for example is

about 30% and then we ask them again how

likely are you to suffer from cancer

what we wanted to know was whether

people will take the information that we

gave them to change their beliefs and

indeed they did but mostly when the

information we gave them was better than

what they expected so for example if

someone said my likelihood of suffering

from cancer is about 50% and we said

hey good news the average likelihood is

only 30% the next time around they would

say well maybe my likelihood is about

35% so they learned quickly and

efficiently but if someone started off

saying my average likelihood of

suffering from cancer is about 10% and

we said hey bad news

the average likelihood is about 30% the

next time around they would say yep

still think it’s about 11%

so it’s not that they didn’t learn at

all they did but much much less than

when we gave them positive information

about the future and it’s not that they

didn’t remember the numbers that we gave

them everyone remembers that the average

likelihood of cancer is about Freddy

percent and the average likelihood of

divorce is about 40 percent but they

didn’t think that those numbers were

related to them what this means is

that’s warning science such as these may

only have limited impact

yes smoking kills but mostly kills the

other guy what I wanted to know was what

was going on inside the human brain that

prevented us from taking these warning

signs personally but at the same time

when we hear that the housing market is

hopeful and we think oh my house is

definitely gonna double in price to try

and figure that out I ask the

participants in the experiment to lie in

a brain imaging scanner it looks like

this and using a method called

functional MRI we were able to identify

regions in the brain that were

responding to positive information one

of these regions is called the left

inferior frontal gyrus so if someone

said my likelihood of suffering from

cancer is 50% and we said hey good news

average likely it is 30% the left

inferior frontal gyrus would respond

fiercely and it didn’t matter if you are

an extreme optimist and mild optimist or

slightly pessimistic everyone’s left

inferior frontal gyrus was functioning

perfectly well whether you’re Barack

Obama or Woody Allen on the other side

of the brain the right inferior frontal

gyrus was responding to bad news and

here’s the thing it wasn’t doing a very

good job the more optimistic he were the

less likely this region was to respond

to unexpected negative information and

if your brain is failing at integrating

bad news about the future you will

constantly leave your rose tinted

spectacles on so we wanted to know could

we change this

could we alter people’s optimism bias by

interfering with the brain activity in

these regions and there’s a way for us

to do that this is my collaborator Rio

de Cali and what he’s doing is he’s

passing a small magnetic poles for the

skull of the participant in our study

into their inferior frontal gyrus and by

doing that he’s interfering with the

activity of this brain region for about

half an hour after that everything goes

back to normal I assure you

so let’s see what happens first of all

I’m gonna show you the average amount of

bias that we see so if I was to test all

of you now this is the amount that you

would learn more from good news relative

to bad news

now we interfere with the region that we

found to integrate negative information

in this task and the optimism bias grew

even larger we made people more biased

in the way that they process information

then we interfered with the brain region

that we found to integrate good news in

this task and the optimism bias

disappeared we were quite amazed by

these results because we were able to

eliminate a deep-rooted bias in humans

and at this point we because we stopped

and we asked ourselves would we want to

shatter the optimism illusion into tiny

little bits if if we could do that would

we want to take people’s optimism bias

away well I’ve already told you about

all of the benefits of the optimism bias

which probably makes you want to hold on

to it for dear life but there are of

course pitfalls and it will be really

foolish of us to ignore them take for

example this email I received from a

firefighter here in California

he says fatality investigations for

firefighters often include we didn’t

think the fire was going to do that even

when all the available information was

there to make safe decisions this

captain is going to use our findings on

the optimism bias to try to explain to

the firefighters why they think the way

they do to make them acutely aware of

this very optimistic bias in humans so

unrealistic optimism can lead to risky

behavior to financial collapse to faulty

planning the British government for

example has acknowledged that the

optimism bias can make individuals more

likely to underestimate the cost and

during

of projects so they have adjusted the

2012 Olympic budget for the optimism

bias my friend who’s getting married in

a few weeks has done the same for his

wedding budget and by the way when I

asked him about his own likelihood of

divorce he said he was quite sure it was

zero percent so what we would really

like to do is we would like to protect

ourselves from the dangers of optimism

but at the same time remain hopeful

benefiting from the many fruits of

optimism and I believe there’s a way for

us to do that the key here really is

knowledge we’re not born with an innate

understanding of our biases these have

to be identified by scientific

investigation but the good news is that

becoming aware of the optimism bias does

not shatter the illusion it’s like

visual illusions in which understanding

them does not make them go away and this

is good because it means we should be

able to strike a balance to come up with

plans and rules to protect ourselves

from unrealistic optimism but at the

same time remain hopeful

I think this cartoon portrays it nicely

because if you’re one of these

pessimistic penguins up there who just

does not believe they can fly you will

certainly never will because to make any

kind of progress we need to be able to

imagine a different reality and then we

need to believe that that reality is

possible but if you are an extreme

optimistic penguin who just jumps down

blindly and hoping for the best you

might find yourself in a bit of a mess

when you hit the ground but if you’re an

optimistic penguin who believes it can

fly but then adjust a parachute to your

back just in case things didn’t work out

exactly as you plans

you will soar like an eagle even if

you’re just a penguin thank you