How Cognitive Biases Bend Reality: Private Optimism vs. Public Despair | Neuroscientist Tali Sharot

I’m going to ask you to imagine your future. So imagine yourself five years from now, ten years from now, 15 years from now. Think about your family, think about your relationships, think about your career. Really try to get vivid images in your mind.

So my first question is: who here comes up with positive images? Just put your hand up. Okay. Yes, that’s quite normal. And now I’m going to ask you four specific questions.

Number one: if you’re currently married what is the likelihood that you will get divorced? Ten percent, 50 percent, 90 percent. So don’t tell us, just keep it in your mind.

Number two: how optimistic are you about your family? Slightly optimistic, very optimistic, not so optimistic.

Number three: how optimistic are you about the other people and other families in this room?

And number four: what are the chances that you will prosper financially and professionally?

And now let’s see how other people answer these questions. We’ll start with marriage. So in the Western world divorce rates are about 40 percent. That means that out of every five couples walking down the aisle, two will end up splitting their assets. But when you ask newlyweds about their own likelihood of divorce they estimate it at around zero percent. And even divorce lawyers, who should really know better, hugely underestimate their own likelihood of divorce.

Now it turns out that optimists are not less likely to divorce but they are more likely to remarry. In the words of Samuel Johnson, “Remarriage is a triumph of hope over experience.” Now statistically if you’re married you’re more likely to have kids and we all think that our kids will be especially talented.

These by the way are my own kids, Livia and Leo, and they’re a very bad example of the optimism bias because they are especially talented. And I’m not alone. Out of every four people, three said that they were optimistic about the future of their own families. That’s 75 percent. But only 30 percent said that they thought that the next generation will be doing better than the current one.

And that’s a really important point because we’re optimistic about ourselves, we’re optimistic about our families, we’re optimistic about our kids. But we’re not so optimistic about the guy sitting next to us. And we’re somewhat pessimistic about the future of our country and the ability of our leaders.

And we call this private optimism versus public despair. One reason for this is control. We feel we have control over our own destiny. We feel we can steer the wheel in the right direction and so we’re optimistic about our own future. But we don’t feel we have control over where our country is going or where our leaders are taking us.

And so we’re less optimistic about those issues. If you take small-business owners, for example, in the U.S. out of every three small-business owners only one small business will remain standing in five years. So that’s 33 percent. But when you ask small business owners about their own likelihood of remaining standing, 80 percent say that it will be them that will succeed.

That means that half of them are going to be unpleasantly surprised when they fail. So these are all examples of what we call the optimism bias which is our tendency to imagine the future to be better than the past or present and, on average, to overestimate our likelihood of experiencing positive events in our lives and underestimate the likelihood of experiencing negative events.

This does not mean that with every aspect of our life we’re optimistic. It doesn’t mean that everyone is optimistic. But on average we find this in about 80 percent of the population and we find it in females, we find it in males, we find it in different countries around the world, in Western countries, in non-Western countries.

So it’s quite a global phenomenon. Usually when people hear about this, the first question that they ask is: well, is this a good thing or is it a bad thing? And the answer is, "Yes". So on the positive side, if we’re optimistic, we have po...