Optimism bias
The tendency to believe we are less likely than other people to face bad events, like illness, accidents or divorce, and more likely to enjoy good ones.
In everyday life
A smoker agrees that smoking causes cancer but feels sure it won't happen to them.
You skip travel insurance for a ski trip because injuries happen to other skiers, even though you ski the same slopes they do.
Why your mind does this
To act at all, we need some belief that our choices matter and that we can pull them off. A bit of extra confidence gets us moving, keeps us going after setbacks, and protects our sense of self-worth and our standing in a group.
How to spot it
Ask yourself what actually makes you different from the typical person this bad outcome happens to.
How to counter it
Look up how often the bad outcome happens to people like you and plan as if that rate applied to you.
Habits that catch it
- Run a pre-mortem
Imagine it is a year from now and the plan failed. List the likeliest reasons, then fix what you can today.
Same family: Confidence to act
- Overconfidence effect
- Social desirability bias
- Third-person effect
- False consensus effect
- Hard-easy effect
- Lake Wobegon effect
- Dunning-Kruger effect
- Egocentric bias
- Optimism bias
- Forer effect
- Barnum effect
- Self-serving bias
- Actor-observer bias
- Illusion of control
- Illusory superiority
- Fundamental attribution error
- Defensive attribution hypothesis
- Trait ascription bias
- Effort justification
- Risk compensation
- Peltzman effect
SourcesWeinstein (1980)·Wikipedia