Unrealistic optimism about future life events: A cautionary note.

2010/11/08 by Adam J. L. Harris, Ulrike Hahn · 221 citations
Decision Sciences · Psychology · #Behavioral Health and Interventions #Cognitive psychology #Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics #Extant taxon #Optimism #Optimism bias #Optimism, Hope, and Well-being #Psychology #Social psychology

paper · doi:10.1037/a0020997

published in Psychological Review 118(1), 135-154 (American Psychological Association)

openalex publication_date 2010/11/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

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.

Citations

• On the psychology of prediction.
• The case for motivated reasoning.
• Social Comparison of Health Risks: Locus of Control, the Person‐Positivity Bias, and Unrealistic Optimism1

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