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. We summarize the vast literature on unrealistic optimism by focusing on four broad questions: What is unrealistic optimism when does it occur why does it occur and what are its consequences. 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. People display unrealistic optimism in their predictions for countless events, believing that their personal future outcomes will be more desirable than can possibly be true. However, we demonstrate how unbiased responses can result in data patterns commonly interpreted as indicative of optimism for purely statistical reasons. People with an adequate understanding of the.

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. Unrealistic optimism need not result from cognitive mistakes about the risks and benefits associated with an event.

Unrealistic optimism future events