Julie K. Norem

Who they are

Norem is a personality psychologist. The two 1986 papers she wrote with Nancy Cantor introduced defensive pessimism, and the one in Cognitive Therapy and Research is the study our article uses, read in full from the author copy.

The design carries the argument, and both of its key decisions are deliberate. 1,027 introductory psychology students were screened on an eight-item academic optimism and pessimism questionnaire plus a choice among four strategy profiles, one of which, a regular pessimistic profile that the authors describe as resembling depression, was excluded. Only students with a grade point average of 3.0 or above were kept, and only those who strongly endorsed having generally done well academically in the past, with no significant difference in grade point average between the groups, 3.34 against 3.23. The selected pessimists sat at an average rank of 1,009 out of 1,027 and the optimists at 22. So the two groups were as far apart as the screening instrument could place them, and demonstrably equally able.

Sixty-nine participants, 35 optimists and 34 pessimists, then predicted their performance on an anagram task, took it, received false success or failure feedback, took it again, completed a post-test and were debriefed. Four findings came out, and the fourth is the one that matters.

The pessimists predicted they would do significantly worse, F(1, 68) = 6.15, p = .02. Actual performance did not differ at either trial, with all F values below 1, which the authors use to argue that differences in ability cannot explain the difference in expectations. Optimists showed attributional egotism and pessimists did not: successful optimists reported significantly more control than failed optimists, F(1, 34) = 14.50, p = .0006 on the first trial, while the pessimists' reports of control did not differ across success and failure feedback. And the pessimists who failed were no less satisfied than the optimists who failed, all F values below 1, despite doing none of the post hoc cushioning. The authors' own conclusion: the pessimists are not simply prone to lower evaluations of their performance, or to a generally gloomy outlook.

Her proposed mechanism is rehearsal. By playing through potential bad outcomes before they occur, the defensive pessimist gains some degree of control over his anxiety, and the strategy seems to be acting as a form of natural cognitive therapy for those using it.

Two limits are her own and must travel with every use. This is a strategy rather than a trait: the academic and social screenings in the same sample correlated at only 0.38, and the paper says these are called strategies precisely because they can be used selectively in different situations. And the study measures expectations, satisfaction and attributions on a word puzzle, not health and not mortality.

One widely repeated claim is not available from her work as read here. Spencer and Norem 1996, described in secondary sources as a dart-throwing study comparing imagery conditions and as finding that defensive pessimists did best after imagining what could go wrong, has not been read by this publication, and the familiar line that pushing positive thinking on a defensive pessimist damages their performance is not supported from anything we have in hand. Her affiliation is given as it stood in 1986 and no current position is asserted.

Key papers

Norem is an academic psychologist whose work reaches this article through journal articles rather than books.

Norem, J. K., & Cantor, N. (1986). "Anticipatory and Post Hoc Cushioning Strategies: Optimism and Defensive Pessimism in 'Risky' Situations." Cognitive Therapy and Research 10(3), 347-362. Read in full for this article, including the prescreening questionnaire, all four tables and the discussion.

Norem, J. K., & Cantor, N. (1986). "Defensive pessimism: Harnessing anxiety as motivation." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51(6), 1208-1217, doi:10.1037/0022-3514.51.6.1208. The companion paper. Not read by this publication; cited for its existence and title only.

Spencer, S. M., & Norem, J. K. (1996), Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Located and not read. Nothing on this page rests on it.

Key ideas

Defensive pessimism: setting a low expectation before a task you care about, in order to manage the anxiety the task produces.

It is a domain-specific strategy, not a personality type. Her own two screenings in one sample correlate at 0.38.

Defensive pessimists perform no differently from optimists on equivalent ability, and lose nothing in satisfaction when things go badly.

Optimists cushion after the fact by claiming less control over failure. Defensive pessimists do their cushioning in advance.

The strategy is explicitly distinguished from depression, by excluding a profile resembling it from the sample.

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