Self-Enhancement, Unrealistic Optimism, and Culture In accounting for the optimistic bias, many researchers have seen it as an instance of the more general “self-enhancing bias.” Further, far from being maladaptive an optimistic bias even if “unrealistic” has long been held to be associated with psychological well-being ( Taylor and Brown, 1988), and conversely, a pessimistic bias is thought to be involved in depression ( Abramson et al., 1978 Miranda and Mennin, 2007). The term refers to a bias whereby “people rate negative events as less likely to happen to themselves than to the average person and positive events as more likely to happen to themselves than to the average person” ( Harris and Hahn, 2011, p. The results, whose clinical relevance is discussed, suggest that the expression of unrealistic optimism is shaped by an interplay of culture and socioeconomic circumstance.Įver since its original demonstration by Weinstein (1980) a great deal of empirical work and theoretical attention has been devoted to the phenomenon of unrealistic optimism. Overall, English participants showed neither optimism nor pessimism for good events.
In India those of higher socioeconomic status (SES) were optimistic, while those of lower SES were on average pessimistic. The position regarding comparative optimism for good events was more complex. Two hundred and eighty seven middle aged and middle income participants (200 in India, 87 in England) rated 11 positive and 11 negative events in terms of the chances of each event occurring in “their own life,” and the chances of each event occurring in the lives of “people like them.” Comparative optimism was shown for bad events, with Indian participants showing higher levels of optimism than English participants. The current study extends enquiry to a different non-Western culture. However, construing unrealistic optimism as a form of self-enhancement, some researchers noted that it was far less common in East Asian cultures. At first, the bulk of research was conducted using populations in North America and Northern Europe, the optimistic bias was thought of as universal, and little attention was paid to cultural context. Department of Psychology, Social Work and Public Health, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UKįollowing Weinstein’s (1980) pioneering work many studies established that people have an optimistic bias concerning future life events.
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