Optimism as a Prior Belief about the Probability of Future Reward

ploscompbiol.org

7 points·timr··3 comments

"...trait optimism doesn't distort how new information is integrated: subjects update their estimates similarly following information that is better or worse than expected."

Are people with high trait optimism disappointed to a greater extent than others? They have to adjust their expectations further to align them with reality/ the results.

Can optimism lead to better outcomes? Can belief in a greater likelihood of the reward lead to it happening? Probably doesn't apply to lotteries and similar situations.

Edit: fixed punctuation.

It's probably worth looking at optimism across multiple independent processes.

As a proportion of human interaction, I would wager that processes which are percievably stationary (or stationary enough), and that a human will interact with over and over again is actually relatively small.

I would hypothesize that had this task been set up with 'moving parts', then optimists could rationalize away their expectations as 'this time it's different'.

I think ultimately, optimism 'works' not because it influences the probability of events happening, but because it influences the distribution of 'payoffs'.

Not sure I follow everything here... Anyone with a better background in this field give a summary?

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