Compared with the average student of your age and sex, how likely do you think you are to contract heart disease?.In a typical study, participants are presented with a variety of future life events, and asked to estimate their chance of experiencing each event, relative to the average person. The paradigm that has provided the majority of evidence in favor of a general optimism bias is Weinstein’s comparative methodology. Such findings are difficult to reconcile with the common position that healthy human thought is characterised by a general optimism bias. Other researchers (e.g., see also, ) have also demonstrated that the likelihood of negative events is overestimated relative to neutral events. Vosgerau demonstrated that people overestimate the likelihood of positive and negative outcomes, relative to the likelihood of neutral ones (see for a failure to replicate Vosgerau’s results with positive outcomes). The unequivocality of evidence in favor of unrealistic optimism has, however, recently been questioned. It is against this background that Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman described optimism as “the most significant of the cognitive biases” (p. Applied practitioners within health psychology, for example, have been concerned that if individuals perceive risks as more relevant to the average person than to themselves, individuals will not take appropriate protective behavior against major risks. Since Weinstein’s seminal paper, a huge number of academic papers (e.g., ) and popular psychological books (e.g., ) have expressed this view, ensuring its prevalence not only in social psychology, but also amongst applied practitioners and laypeople (e.g., ). These statements represent the dominant position in the literature. Compare Lake Wobegon effect, overconfidence effect.People tend to think they are invulnerable and that bad things will happen to others, not to them. See also depressive realism, hypomanic episode. Weinstein asked students to estimate the relative likelihoods of various events happening to them, compared to the likelihoods of the same events happening to their peers, and his results showed that they rated their chances of experiencing positive events, such as owning your own home, receiving a good job offer before graduation, and living past 80, to be significantly above the average for students of the same sex at the same university, and their chances of experiencing negative events, such as having a heart attack before age 40, being sued by someone, and being the victim of a mugging, to be significantly below average. It was first reported in 1925 by the US psychologist F(rederick) H(ansen) Lund (1894–1965) and in 1938 by the US psychologist (Albert) Hadley Cantril (1906–69), and it came to prominence in 1980 when it was studied rigorously and named by the US psychologist Neil D(avid) Weinstein (born 1945) in an article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. A judgemental bias that tends to affect people's subjective estimates of the likelihood of future events in their lives, causing them to overestimate the likelihood of positive or desirable events and to underestimate the likelihood of negative or undesirable events.
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