Our latest research, building on our previous research, supports a re-examination of optimism bias before it guides policy any further.” “Optimism bias is continually being used to guide large government projects, seemingly to manage projections about the time and financial costs of project. Researchers and policy makers have made careers based on the idea of optimism bias, but it is time to reconsider evidence for this psychological phenomenon.” Essentially, current methods return false positives.”Ĭo-researcher Punit Shah, Associate Professor from Bath’s department of Psychology said: “There is of course evidence for optimism in certain situations, but that is not to say that humans are generally optimistic. This is not to say that optimism bias cannot exist in the real world, but that new improved methods are needed. Lead researcher, Jason Burton, from Birkbeck said: “Our experiments show that the method commonly used to evidence such optimism is flawed, giving rise to ‘optimistic’ belief updating where optimism is not possible. In this new study, published this week in the journal Cognition, the researchers tested the same ‘update method’ but removed the emotional element, using neutral examples such as participants estimating the chances of the next passing car being the colour black.ĭespite changing the examples and removing the emotional elements, the same optimistic pattern was observed, leading researchers to challenge the validity of the methods using in research claiming to prove optimism bias.
Typically, this has been done with negative life events, like contracting a disease or getting a divorce - bad news cases that would elicit a strong emotional response. Optimism Bias When looking to our future, we tend to inflate the good stuff and downplay the bad.
#Optimism bias definition update
This methodology - known as ‘the update method’ - has participants estimate their chance of experiencing a life event and then re-estimate it after being provided with the average person’s actual chance of experiencing the event. Optimism bias is a cognitive bias, and it is the tendency for individuals to be overly bullish about the outcomes of planned actions (Kahneman, 2011, p. The researchers conducted several experiments using a methodology that has been widely accepted in past optimism research. According to the authors, prior studies have generated ‘false positives’ - data patterns that look like people are being over-optimistic, where no such bias exists. However, a new study by researchers at the University of Bath, UCL, and Birkbeck, University of London, demonstrates flaws in research supporting the existence of optimism bias. while overestimating their chances of positive events.This over-optimistic tendency is taken into account by the UK government when planning large infrastructure projects. The results provide evidence for the effectiveness of brief interventions to reduce optimism bias.Dictionary definition showing the word optimistĪ new study casts doubt over claims that people are ‘optimistically biased’ about the future, a tendency that is thought to contribute to financial crises, people’s failure to look after their health, or inaction over climate change.įor decades scientists have believed that people have an ‘irrational optimism bias’ - they look too much to the bright side and underestimate their chances of negative experiences.
The effectiveness of the two interventions also differed across individuals depending on their sensation-seeking and past risky driving tendencies. Both brief interventions reduced optimism bias levels, but hazard perception had the strongest effect. Measures evaluating optimism bias were completed before and after the intervention, and questions regarding their sensation-seeking and past risk-taking tendencies were asked at follow-up. One hundred and twenty-eight university students were randomly allocated to one of three groups: standard definition, hazard perception or control. The present study aimed to evaluate how two brief interventions, one based on an unambiguous definition of “good” driving and the other on a hazard perception test, might reduce young drivers’ optimism bias.
Optimism bias combined with sensation-seeking and risky driving have been proposed to be the main contributing factors to young drivers’ involvement in road traffic collisions. Optimism bias refers to an unrealistically positive outlook where an individual assumes that though negative events occur, they can never happen to them.
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