Belief in optimism might be more problematic than actual optimism

People appear to be biased in their predictions of the future; predicting that projects will take less time than they actually will (see Roy et al., 2005a; Buehler et al., 2010; Halkjelsvik and Jørgensen, 2012, for review) and that they will be unlikely to experience future misfortunes (see Dunning et al., 2004, for review). These biases are frequently attributed to people being overly optimistic (Armor and Taylor, 1998, 2002; Dunning et al., 2004). However, research indicates that many of these seemingly motivated biases could actually be due to task characteristics or other non-motivational causes (Juslin et al., 2000; Chambers and Windschitl, 2004; Roy et al., 2005a). Here I review research, focusing on my own work on time estimation and self-assessment, which indicates that these seemingly optimistic biases might often have other nonmotivational causes. Further, I discuss why a belief that people are overly optimistic might be problematic.