Read it, make cuts, but spare the sentences I like. You’ll recognize them. They’re underlined.
Depressed people aside, the rest of us underestimate the likelihood that bad things will happen to us and overestimate the likelihood of good outcomes. Asked to imagine positive scenarios, we do so with greater vividness and more immediacy than when asked to picture negative occurrences - our images of those are hazy and distant.
Now Tali Sharot and her colleagues have investigated the brain mechanisms underlying this rosy outlook. (…)
One key finding is that the participants showed a bias in the way that they updated their estimates, being much more likely to revise an original estimate that was overly pessimistic than to revise an original estimate that was unduly optimistic. (…)
“Our findings offer a mechanistic account of how unrealistic optimism persists in the face of challenging information,” said Sharot and her team. “We found that optimism was related to diminished coding of undesirable information about the future in a region of the frontal cortex (right inferior frontal gyrus) that has been identified as being sensitive to negative estimation errors.”
