Tali Sharot

This is a kind of retrospective optimism bias, but we also suffer from a future-oriented optimism bias as well.

Tali Sharot is a cognitive neuroscientist who has completed extensive research on optimism bias, and in her paper, The Optimism Bias, she explains this.

When it comes to predicting what will happen to us tomorrow, next week, or 50 years from now, we overestimate the likelihood of positive events and underestimate the likelihood of negative ones.

Humans tend to underrate our chances of getting divorced, being in a car accident, or suffering from cancer, whilst also overestimating how long we'll live, how much success we'll have in the job market, and how talented our children will be.

If you ask most people about the quality of their life, the answer you'll get will likely resemble a gut instinct that is plagued with all manner of biases, including the ones that we've gone over here.

But what if people did think about this question? Even then, coming to the conclusion that your life is actually worse than you thought it is isn't a particularly nice thing to think about.

And as we've already heard from the research of Tali Sharot, people aren't likely to update their understanding of their lives if they're confronted with information that shows that it might be worse than they thought.

On top of that, it seems like optimism might actually be beneficial.

... my pitch is like I do think it is better if you can manage it to get these...

T- Tali Sharot to Psychology Corner.

If we go, do a bit of Psychology Corner.

Do you want us to go to-

Yeah, yeah.

Go, go ahead.

Should we do a bit? So there's this fantastic, um, social psychologist called Tali Sharot, and she's, she's done a lot of research on habituation, and she talks a lot about, in her, she's got a brilliant book called The Influential Mind, about how if you break up experiences, people enjoy them more.

The most, the weirdest one is apparently if you have a massage and the masseuse stops for five minutes halfway through, you end up enjoying the massage more.

So let's talk about why it's not just positive thinking, because I think it's important.

Because sometimes when we say things, and I'm not criticizing anybody, but I think a lot of times what happens is as facilitators, instructors, and personal development, it sounds good, but there's no It's not like there's no credibility, but there's no basis in fact, okay? So I always like to go, let's talk about the reality, the real science behind it, right? So there's a guy named Tali Sharot, hopefully I'm pronouncing his name right, right? T-A-L-I-S-H-R-O-T at the University of College in London.

And what he did is he spent all this time, all these years studying optimism bias, optimism bias, right? So it's the brain's orientation to the future.

So, and to her, by the way, sorry.