![]() The reason for this discrepancy is not a naive belief that fortune will somehow smile upon us. We see this exemplified in a survey revealing that 75 percent of British people are optimistic about their family’s future, but that only 30 percent think that families in general are better off today than they were a few generations ago. Indeed, we’re only optimistic about our own future and that of our loved ones – not about the future of others. Yet, when you ask newlywed couples if they think they will get divorced, they’ll usually tell you there is a zero-percent chance.Įven divorce lawyers, whose professional experiences tell them otherwise, greatly underestimate the likelihood that they, too, will get divorced.ĭespite our love for optimistic thinking, our optimism has limits. Consider, for example, that in the Western world the divorce rate is about 40 percent. What’s more, optimism bias can sometimes take on extreme forms. This bias causes people to overestimate the likelihood of experiencing positive events, such as a job promotion, and underestimate the likelihood of experiencing negative events, like a car accident. In fact, according to a study by Yale psychologist David Armor, about 80 percent of people have what is called an optimism bias, that is, the tendency to look into our future optimistically rather than realistically. Let’s start with a quick (albeit macabre) question: What’s the likelihood of your getting cancer one day? If you predicted the probability to be lower than 33 percent – the actual statistical probability of getting cancer – then you’re in good company. Seventy-five percent of the time, the participants didn’t even notice the switch, and thus justified a choice they hadn’t actually made.Įven stranger, when asked afterward if they thought they would hypothetically notice such a switch, 84 percent of those that had just been fooled confidently exclaimed that they would easily detect such trickery. But this time they were given pictures of the women they had actually rated lower. They were asked later to explain their choices. In the experiment, participants were given pairs of photos depicting different women, and were tasked with deciding which of the two they found more attractive. To demonstrate this point, consider a study conducted by cognitive scientist Petter Johansson. We tend to trust our perceptions, and thus don’t realize that the way we see the world is usually misguided. It’s hard to avoid such delusional thoughts about the world around us. How can most people be better than the rest? This phenomenon, one of many that shapes our perception of the world, is called superiority bias. Of course, it’s statistically impossible for this to actually be the case. If you’re like most people you will have rated yourself above average. So, did you rate yourself in the bottom 25 percent, the top 25 percent or somewhere in between? To get an idea of just how biased we are, consider the following questions and then rate yourself relative to the rest of the population: Do you play well with others? Are you a good driver? How honest are you? Why? The way we perceive reality is simply not rational often, it’s full of bias. In fact, this belief is so central to our self-perception that we even included it in the name of our species: Homo sapiens, the “wise man.” However, as you’ll soon discover, we may have been a bit too optimistic. ![]() © SelfHelp.People like to view themselves as rational beings. Self-Help Books Just for You Find self-help books by genre SelfHelp.fm is home to the definitive list of the Top 100 Self-Help Books of All Time. For him, we’re all capable of a higher level of thinking.Ĭheck prices on : Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, Martin Seligman. Best of all, Seligman puts forth techniques to make us all more optimistic. Pessimists believe external events are their fault while optimists view them as hurdles to be overcome. ![]() “Learned Optimism” starts out by comparing pessimists and optimists. The founder and leading proponent of positive psychology, Seligman isn’t as interested in what makes the mind unwell, as he is in what causes one person to be able to excel - often outclassing his or her peers. Few modern psychologists can claim to have fathered a new school of psychological thought, but Martin Seligman might be one of them. 26 on our list of the Top 100 self-help books of all time. ![]() 26: Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life, by Martin Seligman Martin Seligman's self-help book, 'Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life', has landed at No. ![]()
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