Unrealistic optimism and the ethics of phase I cancer research

Unrealistic optimism in early-phase oncology trials.

Unrealistic optimism is a bias that leads people to believe, with respect to a specific event or hazard, that they are more likely to experience positive outcomes and/or less likely to experience negative outcomes than similar others. The phenomenon has been seen in a range of health-related contexts—including when prospective participants are presented with the risks and benefits of participat...

Unrealistic Optimism: East and West?

Following Weinstein's (1980) pioneering work many studies established that people have an optimistic bias concerning future life events. 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. However, construing unrealistic optimism as a form of self-...

What is unrealistic optimism?

Here we consider the nature of unrealistic optimism and other related positive illusions. We are interested in whether cognitive states that are unrealistically optimistic are belief states, whether they are false, and whether they are epistemically irrational. We also ask to what extent unrealistically optimistic cognitive states are fixed. Based on the classic and recent empirical literature ...

Vestibular stimulation reduces unrealistic optimism

Toward a Neurobiology of Unrealistic Optimism

Research spanning three decades has found that human judgment is characterized by unrealistic optimism (or “optimism bias”), the tendency to underestimate the likelihood of negative events and overestimate the likelihood of positive events (Weinstein, 1980). This work has recently garnered much interest, some question its existence (Harris and Hahn, 2011), while others have found support for it...