There's one brain bias that affects 80% of adults and it has a familiar name you may not expect: optimism. Not always thought of as a cognitive mechanism, the optimism bias leads people to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes and to underestimate the likelihood of negative outcomes. It can be hugely helpful in our social lives and in keeping us motivated even if the trade off is, at times, the denial of reality.

So where does this cognitive bias come from? Are we born with it, or do we develop it as we grow? Developmental psychologist Lori Markson compiles research about how optimism works in babies and young kids, and how that may help us to understand why we adults are the way we are. 

Transcript: As a developmental psychologist who studies cognition in children we were really excited to be able to focus on a particular aspect of a cognitive bias, which is the development of optimism in children. So we’re often studying cognitive mechanisms and how children are using these to reason about various aspects of the world around them, including other people’s thoughts and preferences.

And we also are looking at how children are choosing to learn from other people as well. So I’m going to talk about two lines of research. One—which I'll mostly talk about—is looking at the development of optimism in children, which we were really grateful to the Hope and Optimism Initiative to fund, so that we could do that. And another line is looking at, outside of children, how we’re thinking about society and how children’s own optimism might also apply to groups and society as well.

So for the purposes of operationalizing how we were going to go about studying optimism and where to start looking at this in children, we took a working definition that’s come from Tali Sharot, who’s going to speak here later, as well as others working in this field, thinking about optimism as a cognitive bias.

And this is a bias to overestimate the likelihood of positive outcomes and to underestimate the likelihood of negative outcomes. And there’s been a lot of work on this with adults which Mike already talked about, and Tali is going to speak about it and I’m not going to go into detail on it, but typically, roughly we see 80 percent of the adult population is optimistic.

So what about kids? I mean are kids optimistic in the same way as adults? Do we see this optimism bias? Now what we have seen in the data that we know to date is that kids are very positive. They seem to be very positive about themselves, and interpret expectations for themselves very positively, especially up to about six years of age or so.

But if you ask children, and you ask them to evaluate themselves, they tend to do this really positively. So here’s an example of watching a bunch of kids in a race, and one girl has pointed out that she can’t run very fast, and another girl over there has pointed out she can run fast. And a child is simply asked, “Which girl are you more like?” Okay, this is the way we can ask simple questions and get data out of kids. And here’s a six-year-old girl's typical answer, it would be something like: “Her. I’m more like the fast girl.” And kids will evaluate these on different scales but they tend toward optimism or at least having positive interpretations.

You can also look at this in an academic realm and something that can be evaluated much more easily, because you can ask for an adult evaluation of the situation. So here’s a child, again up to roughly six or so years of age, you ask them, “How do you do in school?” And they say, “I’m really good. I get mostly As and I get lots of stars on my papers.” But if you ask the teacher they have a different answer: “About a B student. Sometimes gets a star.”

And what you see is this initial escalation in being positive, and then this starts to become more realistic. The child’s own view of themselves comes more in line with reality.

So we were asking the question: are children optimists or realists? Because all of the previous work didn’t really look at optimism. It looked only at positivity about self. How about applying these kinds of things to different likelihoods of expectations out there in the real world?

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This video was filmed at the Los Angeles Hope Festival, a collaboration between Big Think and Hope & Optimism.

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