Another important dimension is those individuals who are being the most cautious. “They’re in isolation wards in hospitals. That’s when people overemphasize things they see, like the healthy people they encounter at the park or at the supermarket, during the pandemic and downplay what they don’t see. Management professor Don Moore at the University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business studies salience bias. There is another type of overconfidence experts worry about. We just do those things because they’re habits,” she said. We don’t stop wearing our seat belts because we have not experienced seat belts saving our lives. “We don’t brush our teeth as a result of some careful risk estimation of our cavity proneness. Helweg-Larsen said optimism bias is hard to overcome, but one way to fight it is to force yourself to develop good habits, like washing your hands over and over again, for 20 seconds, until you no longer think about why. “When people don’t think they are personally at risk, they are less likely to wash their hands or engage in social distancing,” she said. She teaches psychology at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. But it can also lead to reckless behavior, like borrowing too much money or being careless about COVID-19, according to a study Marie Helweg-Larsen is writing up. It’s tied to longer lives and less depression. And in fact, we’ve done brain imaging studies that show the brain encodes this unexpected positive information about the future better than unexpected negative information,” she said.
“We take in the positive a little more than the negative. Sharot has found that people underprocess the bad news and don’t build it into their expectations. With the pandemic, we get good news one day, bad news the next. “Optimism bias is our tendency to overestimate the likelihood of experiencing positive events - such as financial success or having a long, happy marriage - and our tendency to underestimate the likelihood of experiencing negative events,” said Tali Sharot, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London and author the “The Optimism Bias.” Behavioral scientists and economists have found patterns suggesting we downplay the likelihood of bad news, whether it’s investments, business plans or getting COVID-19. The fear is we might be letting our guard down because of what’s called optimism bias. Average new cases per day have jumped in the past week to more than 50,000. We are now seven months into the pandemic, and the numbers are once again getting worse.
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