How optimistic should we be about optimism research?

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. More recently, it has been shown that when presented with new information pertaining to the likelihood of events in the world, people update their likelihood estimates of these events happening to them less when the information is undesirable than when it is desirable. Thus, participants also seem optimistically biased in their use of new information. Subsequent research has sought to identify neural correlates, individual differences, and developmental trends associated with this so-called ‘optimistic belief updating.’ Rational analyses have, however, demonstrated flaws associated with both these paradigms that render both behavioral and neuroscientific conclusions moot. In this talk, I present these analyses (supplemented with experimental data), and additionally provide an evaluation of the novel methods that have subsequently been proposed in light of the original critiques. I conclude that we are still short of identifying appropriate methodologies to address these questions, but suggest potential directions for future research.

About the speaker

Adam is an experimental psychologist who primarily specialises in Judgment and Decision Making research. He completed his PhD in psychology at Cardiff University, before taking up a Research Fellowship at the University of Warwick. Following this, he moved to UCL to work closely with the MSc in Cognitive and Decision Sciences, a course which he has now the director of. Adam’s affiliation with this course, and a series of excellent and interesting MSc students potentially is a causal factor in a fairly broad range of research interests. Much of his research can, however, be linked to themes of risk perception and/or risk communication, with a specific link to how people understand probabilistic information. More applied areas of his research have benefited from external collaborations with institutions including the British Geological Survey and the Metropolitan Police.