The Effects of Regulatory Focus and Past Performance Information on Temporal Bias of Future Optimism

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Individuals tend to become more optimistically biased about the future as temporal distance increases. This study presents that such tendency will be moderated by individuals’ regulatory focus orientation. We show that prediction on future optimism bias does not hold for prevention-focused individuals. Furthermore, we propose that prevention-focused individuals will begin to exhibit future optimism when they are presented with an option that has been showing a decreasing performance trend in the past. These effects are mediated by individuals’ degree of elaboration about the potential outcome.