It means we’re less likely to give up, more likely to overcome challenges and ultimately more likely to survive.īut as humans, we have to get better at identifying when optimism is toxic to achieving our end goals and when it plays a vital part of the solution. To be clear, I am all for optimism, and we are going to need it. There has to be a way that we can consciously counter this bias.
I believe this is one of our most fundamental flaws as human beings but I also believe there must be a solution to this problem. A large-scale pandemic was predicted by many, with Bill Gates famously warning of this in his 2015 talk “ The next outbreak? We’re not ready ”. In the last post I mentioned the Second World War, The Fall of Rome, failing businesses and the Financial Crash but over-optimism exacerbates so many disasters, with the most recent example being the Coronavirus Pandemic. We have a strong belief that things will turn out okay and often that stops us from responding to threats with an appropriate level of action. In the previous post we talked about a lack of action in the build up to disaster being driven by this desire not to believe we’re heading for trouble and optimism is simply the flip side of the same coin.
The problem comes when we project that optimism into the future. For example, we may underestimate our chances of getting cancer and overestimate the chances of victory for our favourite football team.įrom an evolutionary perspective that makes sense… if our ancestors, when confronted by a saber-tooth, believed they could escape it, then they’d probably try harder and that would increase their chances of survival (which is a good thing). It’s a well studied field within Psychology and according to this TED talk optimism bias exists in around 80% of us, causing us to overestimate positive events occurring in our lives and underestimate our likelihood of experiencing bad events. Optimism is part of the problem & solution to climate change.
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