ERIC Number: EJ933670
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2011-Jan
Pages: 20
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-0033-295X
EISSN: N/A
Unrealistic Optimism about Future Life Events: A Cautionary Note
Harris, Adam J. L.; Hahn, Ulrike
Psychological Review, v118 n1 p135-154 Jan 2011
A robust finding in social psychology is that people judge negative events as less likely to happen to themselves than to the average person, a behavior interpreted as showing that people are "unrealistically optimistic" in their judgments of risk concerning future life events. However, we demonstrate how unbiased responses can result in data patterns commonly interpreted as indicative of optimism for purely statistical reasons. Specifically, we show how extant data from unrealistic optimism studies investigating people's comparative risk judgments are plagued by the statistical consequences of sampling constraints and the response scales used, in combination with the comparative rarity of truly negative events. We conclude that the presence of such statistical artifacts raises questions over the very existence of an optimistic bias about risk and implies that to the extent that such a bias exists, we know considerably less about its magnitude, mechanisms, and moderators than previously assumed. (Contains 7 figures, 2 tables and 12 footnotes.)
Descriptors: Social Psychology, Attitudes, World Views, Risk, Experience, Bias, Psychology, Futures (of Society), Pattern Recognition, Sampling, Context Effect, Responses, Statistical Data, Probability
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Opinion Papers
Education Level: Adult Education
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A