In The weekend science ticket today with Mathilde Fontez, editor-in-chief of the new scientific magazine Epsiloon, we talk about us.
franceinfo: While in general we tend to be optimistic, to think that everything will always be fine, a study shows that this is not the case …
Mathilde Fontez: It was, however, a well-established idea in psychology. A bias, as they say. The optimism bias. Until then, specialists had shown that we tend – on average obviously – to overestimate our chances of success. To think that everything is going to be fine. And this, even when we are given information that tells us the opposite!
For example, when we assess our chances of divorce, we set them – still on average – around 5%. And even when we are told that 45% of marriages end in divorce, we keep the 5%, pretty much. Basically, we say to ourselves: “This is not going to happen to me”. Except that this optimistic bias, a team of English researchers has just shown that in fact, it does not exist.
So we are pessimistic?
Neither pessimists nor optimists in fact. We are simply attached to our convictions. We are reluctant to update our beliefs. To show this, the researchers simply replicated the tests that proved the optimism bias, but with neutral questions.
For example: how many black cars are you going to see on the street today? How likely are you to have a car accident this month? And they have found that people react in exactly the same way. They are not optimistic. They are not pessimistic. They simply do not re-implement – or little – their belief from real statistics.
We prefer to continue to believe, whether we hear good or bad news …
It’s a bit like that, yes. And that changes everything in fact, this awareness. Because this optimistic bias was so installed that it is taken into account in a host of situations. It was thought that it contributes, for example, to the inability of smokers to quit: others will get cancer, but not me. That it plays a role in our difficulty in changing our habits to fight against global warming.
It was even taken into account for large projects, assuming that different contractors would overestimate their chance of meeting deadlines. This study, which shows that optimism bias does not exist, could therefore have practical consequences: the strategies to help us change our convictions are not the same as those to fight against generalized optimism.