Since lung cancer risk is increased by smoking, a voluntary activity, it should automatically inspire more unrealistic optimism than risk for cancers that appear to strike more randomly. In other words, the more control you have over the likelihood of something bad happening to you, the more you’ll deny your susceptibility to it. In particular, unhappy outcomes that are presumed to be controllable (and hence, avoidable) are associated with high levels of unrealistic optimism. those that are more severe, frequent or aligned with social stereotypes. Some hypothesise that the bias is more sensitive to certain types of negative events, e.g. Since the optimism bias was first discovered in a seminal 1980 study, researchers have been trying to figure out how it works. Popular media’s embrace of this research has recently produced a bestselling book and a spate of articles blaming unrealistic optimism for everything from stock market bubbles to the election victory of Donald Trump.
For their part, many neuroscientists argue that our brains are engineered for optimism, which if true would certainly explain the durability of the bias. The so-called “optimism bias” persists even after people have been given true information about risk, research finds. That’s what most experts in the social sciences contend, based on a mountain of studies showing that people consistently report being at less risk than others of experiencing negative life events. Whether you know it or not, you’re probably an optimist.
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