Michael Scheier

Who they are

Scheier is a personality psychologist whose work on self-regulation and generalised expectancies with Charles Carver produced dispositional optimism as a measurable construct. The questionnaire they published in 1985, revised in 1994 to ten items of which six are scored, is short, transparent and easy to attach to a study designed for something else, which is why the literature on optimism and physical health is as large as it is. Scheier's own account of that, as quoted in Sumit Paul-Choudhury's The Bright Side, is that the brevity of the scale enabled lots of people to include it in their work.

The 2020 paper is what makes him the central figure in our article, and the design deserves describing. Optimism is conventionally treated as one bipolar dimension, with pessimism at the far end, so a single summed score is reported. Whether that is defensible depends on whether the presence of optimism or the absence of pessimism does the predicting, and the numbers needed to find out cannot be extracted from already-published papers. So the Optimism/Pessimism Meta-Analytic Consortium wrote to the original authors of 61 samples and asked them to rerun their own analyses with the subscales separated, then pooled what came back: 221,133 participants.

The result, from the abstract: the combined index gave a correlation with aggregated physical health outcomes of 0.026, the absence of pessimism 0.029, and the presence of optimism 0.011, with the pessimism effect significantly larger, Z = -2.403, p < .02. The public significance statement says it in plain words, that the absence of pessimism is more strongly related to good physical health than the presence of optimism is.

Three things in the body matter as much as the headline, and all three are the authors' own. Their sensitivity analyses identified two studies that, when removed, made the optimism subscale non-significant, while the combined scale and the pessimism subscale depended on no single study. Their publication-bias checks found Egger's regression significant for the combined scale and for the pessimism subscale, so some publication bias did exist, with trim-and-fill leaving the primary conclusions unchanged. And their limitations record that over 90 per cent of the pooled sample were white and women and over 90 per cent of the studies were conducted in the United States, with heterogeneity running at around 60 per cent for the primary analyses. They also bound their own claim, noting that the outcomes were all physical health and that it would be wrong to extrapolate to other kinds of outcome.

What to make of a correlation of 0.011 is a question about practical rather than statistical significance. It is significant in 221,133 people and in any practical sense it is nothing, and it disappears when two studies are dropped. The part worth dwelling on is who established it. The man who built the scale convened the consortium, obtained the subscale reanalyses, published the result in the field's flagship journal and wrote the deflationary sentence himself. That is what good conduct looks like in a literature with an incentive to go the other way.

Key papers

Scheier is an academic psychologist whose influence runs through journal articles and an edited and co-authored research literature rather than through trade books, so this section lists papers.

Scheier, M. F., Swanson, J. D., Barlow, M. A., Greenhouse, J. B., Wrosch, C., & Tindle, H. A., for the Optimism/Pessimism Meta-Analytic Consortium (2020). "Optimism Versus Pessimism as Predictors of Physical Health: A Comprehensive Reanalysis of Dispositional Optimism Research." American Psychologist, advance online publication 24 September 2020, doi:10.1037/amp0000666. Read in full for this article, including the publication-bias and limitations sections.

Scheier, M. F., Carver, C. S., & Bridges, M. W. (1994). "Distinguishing optimism from neuroticism and trait anxiety, self-mastery, and self-esteem: A reevaluation of the Life Orientation Test." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 67(6), 1063-1078. The revision in current use. Not read by this publication.

Rasmussen, H. N., Scheier, M. F., & Greenhouse, J. B. (2009). "Optimism and physical health: a meta-analytic review." Annals of Behavioral Medicine 37(3), 239-256. 83 studies and 108 effect sizes, with a mean effect size of 0.17 and larger effects where health was measured subjectively than objectively. Not read; recorded from bibliographic records. The 2020 reanalysis used this paper's search framework.

Key ideas

Dispositional optimism as a generalised expectancy, measurable with a short self-report scale, and distinct from comparative optimism and from explanatory style.

The Life Orientation Test and its 1994 revision, the instrument behind almost every finding in this field.

The 2020 finding that separating the scale's halves puts the predictive relationship with physical health at the pessimistic pole: 0.029 for the absence of pessimism against 0.011 for the presence of optimism.

The optimism effect is fragile. Removing two studies makes it non-significant; the pessimism subscale and the combined scale depend on no single study.

Publication bias is present in this literature, detected by Egger's regression on the combined scale and the pessimism subscale, and reported by the instrument's own author.

The samples are narrow: over 90 per cent white and women, over 90 per cent American.

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