Abstract
One of the most accepted findings across psychology is that people are unrealistically optimistic in their judgments of comparative risk concerning future life events—they judge negative events as less likely to happen to themselves than to the average person. Harris and Hahn (2011), however, demonstrated how unbiased (non-optimistic) responses can result in data patterns commonly interpreted as indicative of optimism due to statistical artifacts. In the current paper, we report the results of 5 studies that control for these statistical confounds and observe no evidence for residual unrealistic optimism, even observing a ‘severity effect’ whereby severe outcomes were overestimated relative to neutral ones (Studies 3 & 4). We conclude that there is no evidence supporting an optimism interpretation of previous results using the prevalent comparison method.
Highlights
People tend to think they are invulnerable and that bad things will happen to others, not to them
The subjective ratings were as we had expected with the exception of the event ‘marry a film star’ which was judged to be a negative event by our participants
In Study 1, we showed that the same negative difference score is observed for rare positive events, which, should be interpreted as pessimism on the standard unrealistic optimism interpretation, but which is readily predicted by Harris and Hahn’s artifactual account
Summary
People tend to think they are invulnerable and that bad things will happen to others, not to them. These statements represent the dominant position in the literature. 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. It is against this background that Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman [17] described optimism as “the most significant of the cognitive biases” Other researchers (e.g., [22,23,24]; see [25]) have demonstrated that the likelihood of negative events is overestimated relative to PLOS ONE | DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0173136 March 9, 2017
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