

You may believe in a “chance” so strongly that when your health doesn’t improve or you realize you’ve wasted a week’s pay on lottery tickets, your disappointment and regret might be overwhelming. Author & abstract Download 15 References. You might assume a “one in a million chance” that a drug is going to help you get over a challenging illness or that the Powerball is definitely going to roll in your favor. A second explanation for the fact that unrealistic optimism is higher among the HIV+ men is that optimism may develop as an effort to cope with threat and. Expectations with Unrealistic Optimism: An Empirical Application. And this can lead to some upsetting outcomes that “ positive thinking” gurus might not have thought about.įor instance, being unrealistically optimistic might lead you to believe that a potential opportunity is more of a “sure thing” than it really is.
#DEALING WITH A UNREALISTIC OPTIMISM UPDATE#
(1982), Cognitive strategies for coping with uncertain. An earlier study on unrealistic optimism, or what the authors call positive illusions, said that one indicator of toxic positivity is if they update their beliefs based on new information. It’s not that unrealistic optimists are doing anything “wrong,” they are just not doing anymore more “right” than the dispositionally optimistic – or pessimistic – individuals around them. Although evidence for unrealistic optimism is considerable, there is reason to.
