Guess what, people still put money in and then raged at the machine when it did exactly what the notice said – ate their money. Scientist Tali Sharot gave a brilliant TED talk about optimism bias in which she shared and interesting experiment with random conference participants in which they placed in the lobby faulty vending machines for coffee and snacks and on each machine there was a notice explaining the machine sometimes eats your money. Neuroscientists contribute our over optimistic behavior to actual physical set-up of our brain which processes positive and negative thought in different parts so we could say optimism bias is like the majority of other behavioral biases deeply rotted in us. We just can`t help ourselves to be optimistic. I dare to say, even if the lottery would publicly announce that in the next round, there will be no winners, a lot of people would still buy the ticket even though they would have an official statement that there will be no winners. I mean why not? Even though the odds are horrifically stacked against them you would be labeled a big pessimist, if you would point out to them how low the odds really are. Most people who play the lottery also believe that they might just win it. I will live longer than the average, I won`t be involved in a car accident and I will for sure never get cancer, … are just some thoughts that most readers of these lines will surely agree with.Īnd then there is the lottery. “All the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average”

We spend most of our lives living in “Lake Wobegon”, which is a fictional town created by American author and humorist Garrison Keillor where, as he put it: It means in short the majority of us overestimate the probability of positive events in the future and underestimate the probability of negative events. Optimism bias is one of the more known cognitive biases researched by many behavioral economists and psychologists.

Optimism bias meaning