#Unrealistic optimism rates drivers

#Unrealistic optimism rates drivers

We are likely to think of ourselves not only as better drivers and planners than we truly are, we may also overestimate our helpfulness, kindness, honesty and other moral traits. As Kahneman notes, it can feed our overconfidence bias. The optimism bias reduces our stress and anxiety.īut the optimism bias can have adverse effects as well. Irrational optimism helps the rest of us avoid the depression that can plague those who are better calibrated regarding the threats to our happiness that we will face in the future. People with the bias tend to be happier in the moment and more eager to take on the challenges of the future. In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant cognitive bias.”Īs it happens, unrealistic optimism has many benefits. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters overconfidence. Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman has said: “Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. Studies show that the optimism bias contributes to the tendency of construction projects to be much more expensive and take longer to complete than originally estimated, of students to not worry about cyberthreats because they think they are much less vulnerable to them than their peers, of taxi drivers to overestimate their ability to drive safely while fatigued, and of bankers to overprice IPOs. We predict that we’ll make lots of money and have productive careers, our children will be very talented, and the car wrecks, divorces, layoffs, cancers, and dementia that happen to other people will not happen to us. The optimism bias (also known as the “overoptimism bias”) is, according to psychologist Tali Sharot, “the inclination to overestimate the likelihood of encountering positive events in the future and to underestimate the likelihood of experiencing negative events.” This bias has a neurophysiological basis and is powerful, in part, because people tend not to be consciously aware of it.īecause of the optimism bias, most of us irrationally expect our lives to go better than a rational person would forecast. But it is quite likely that another contributing factor was the well-known optimism bias that 80% of us suffer. Hanna Horka’s tragic death is attributable in part to misinformation and perhaps political inclination. On January 20, 2022, CNN reported that a well-known Czech folk singer, who also happened to be a vocal anti-vaxxer, had died of COVID-19 after intentionally exposing herself to the virus so that she could be “done with COVID.” She was confident that COVID-19 posed no serious threat to her health.