What impact does optimism bias, confirmation bias, or illusory superiority basis have on safety behaviour and coaching?

Just like all measurable biological and behavioral attributes, people vary in terms of their degree of optimism vs. pessimism. However there is a long recognized bias towards optimism. On average, we tend to view the world through the metaphorical rose-tinted glasses. This is just one of the many biases that affect how we process and remember information. A new study looks specifically at the neurological processes that underly this optimism bias. Researchers looked at 19 subjects, asking them to answer a series of questions about their estimate of how likely they were to suffer negative events in the future (like having an accident or getting a serious disease). They then provided them with statistical information about this likelihood, and asked them again to estimate their personal chances of suffering the negative event.

The researchers found, not surprisingly, an optimism bias. Subjects were more likely to update their estimates when the real statistics were more optimistic than their initial estimates, and less likely to update their estimates (or by a smaller amount) when the real statistics were worse than their initial estimates. In other words, they selectively incorporated optimistic information into their world-view, and ignored or downplayed pessimistic information.

Learn more: http://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/is-optimism-a-cognitive-flaw/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter