unrealistic optimism and susceptibility to trickery

Along with our likelihood to be optimistic, humans consistently make what is referred to by psychologists as a fundamental attribution error due to our self-serving bias. Negative outcomes tend to surprise people, and thus we are more likely to attribute negative results or outcomes to situational and external factors, rather than to personal reasons. 5 Natural OptimismĪnother reason that this cognitive bias is particularly common, is due to the fact that humans are inherently optimistic. To continue to enhance their self-esteem, an individual actively portrays favorable impressions of themselves to others. Self-presentation aids individuals in maintaining their self-esteem, as they are affected by other’s perceptions of themselves. Self-presentation is either used to present information to match an individual’s self-image to others or present information to match audience expectations and preferences. Self-presentation describes how an individual conveys information about themselves to others. The self-serving bias skews our perception of ourselves and of our reality, in order to improve and preserve our own self-esteem in the process. 3 By attributing our successes to our own characteristics, and our failures to external circumstances, we spare ourselves of any real opportunity for criticism. The self-serving bias is common in relation to our need to either maintain or enhance our own self-esteem. 3 Researchers have identified several different reasons for why the self-serving bias occurs so frequently among individuals. The Self-Serving bias is extremely common and is described as a human perceptual process that is distorted. Reducing cognitive biases in policymakers and government officials is necessary to ensure policy decisions are based on fact, and better improve populations they serve. The self-serving bias can additionally influence other policy decisions at all levels of government.

Researchers noted that interventions that aim to mitigate self-serving biases may eventually facilitate agreement in environmental policy discussions, both at the national and international levels. Their research confirmed that self-serving biases do in fact play a major role in explaining why it is so difficult to obtain an agreement on how nations should implement emission reduction strategies.

By conducting surveys among both college students in China and the United States, the researchers noted that each group of students held nationalistic self-serving biases in regards to the economic burdens that would result from mitigating climate change and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. A study conducted by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University looked at climate change policy and citizens’ perceptions on which country should lower its emissions. An example can be seen when looking at nations and climate change. The findings are discussed in terms of cognitive and motivational processes.The self-serving biases can have larger impacts when looking at societies and nations as a whole. These hypotheses were supported in a study in which 62 high school students assigned occurrence probabilities to 12 relevant future events representing 4 categories of events, i.e., positive events perceived as controllable or uncontrollable, and negative events perceived as controllable or uncontrollable. It was further hypothesized that in the case of positive-uncontrollable events the probabilities assigned to oneself might be equal or even lower than those assigned to a comparison-target. It was hypothesized that participants, while comparing themselves to an unknown comparison-target, will assign higher occurrence probabilities for positive-controllable events, and lower occurrence probabilities for negative events to themselves, than respective probabilities assigned to a vague comparison-target. The influence of the interaction between the valence of a future event and its perceived controllability on the degree of unrealistic optimism (UO) was tested.

Unrealistic optimism and susceptibility to trickery