But 80 percent of workers believed that their own jobs would remain intact. Take these Pew Research Center findings: In 2015, 65 percent of a representative sample of American workers predicted that automation would monopolize most of the work currently performed by humans within 50 years. People may think their odds are better than average because they don’t know what the average really is. For instance, someone might think she’s less prone to diabetes than others, even if she weighs the same, eats the same, shares similar family history with, and has the same lifestyle as the people she's comparing herself to. “People don’t say, ‘It can’t happen to me.’ It’s more like, ‘It could happen to me, but it’s not as likely as for other people around me.’” People predict that they’re less likely than others to experience illness, injury, divorce, death, and other adverse events-even when they’re exposed to the same risk factors. It’s not outright denial of risk, says Weinstein. Unrealistic optimism is thinking that good things are more likely to happen to you than to other people, whereas bad things are less likely. So he was sitting at his punch-card machine punching people’s responses when he realized that “all the responses were on the below-average side of the scale.” It was the late 1970s, and for no particular reason he had asked study subjects to rate their likelihood of experiencing certain negative future events, like getting divorced, fired, or mugged, from “below average risk” to “above average risk.” This was back when data were manually entered on yellow punch cards.
The Rutgers University psychologist Neil Weinstein discovered unrealistic optimism by accident. There is, the economist Sergey Smirnov wrote in a review of economists’ botched predictions on the 2008 recession, “some deep inherent unwillingness to predict undesirable things.”īut people’s thinking isn’t as simplistic as “I wish it to happen, so it will” or, “I don’t want it to happen, so it won’t.” Self-interest influences our predictions in subtler ways. economy any time in 2008, despite visible signals of an impending recession.
UNREALISTIC OPTIMISM FOR DIVORCED PERSON PROFESSIONAL
In November 2007, economists in the Philadelphia Federal Reserve’s Survey of Professional Forecasters predicted just a 20 percent chance of “negative growth”-read: decline-in the U.S. Likewise, after the 2008 election, researchers analyzed survey predictions from 19,000 Americans and found that Democrats tended to think Barack Obama was more likely to win, while Republicans assumed John McCain would.Ĭonversely, the more someone dreads or fears a potential outcome, the less likely they think it is to happen. “People distort their perception of an election's closeness in ways that are consistent with their preferences,” a later paper concluded. presidential elections between 19, they found that 80 percent of each of the major candidates’ supporters expected their preferred candidate to win by a ratio of around four to one. When the sociologists Edward Brent and Donald Granberg studied wish fulfillment in U.S. Psychology research indeed suggests that the more desirable a future event is, the more likely people think it is. “Those who were the beneficiaries of the existing state of affairs were extremely reluctant to predict its end,” Danziger explains, “while those who felt oppressed by the same situation found it all too easy to foresee its collapse.” Students’ predictions were more like fantasies. Only 4 percent of white Afrikaners, on the other hand, thought the same. Roughly two-thirds of black Africans and 80 percent of Indian descendants predicted social and political changes amounting to the end of apartheid.
Of course, everyone wrote about apartheid. “This is not a test of imagination-just describe what you really expect to happen,” the instructions read. Write an essay predicting how the rest of the 20th century unfolds, he told them.
Between 19, the University of Cape Town psychologist Kurt Danziger asked 436 South African high-school and college students to imagine they were future historians.
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