A pessimistic view of optimistic belief updating
Shah, Harris, Bird, Catmur and Hahn examine the claim that people hold unrealistic optimism and that this arises from belief updating in which favourable information shifts risk estimates more than unfavourable information. Using task analyses, simulations and experiments they argue the updating pattern is a statistical artefact, that a robust test of optimistic updating would be very difficult to build and that none currently exists, and that across five experiments they found no evidence of optimistic updating. They conclude this casts doubt on optimism as a basic feature of healthy cognition.
Shah, Harris, Bird, Catmur and Hahn examine the claim that people hold unrealistic optimism and that this arises from belief updating in which favourable information shifts risk estimates more than unfavourable information. Using task analyses, simulations and experiments they argue the updating pattern is a statistical artefact, that a robust test of optimistic updating would be very difficult to build and that none currently exists, and that across five experiments they found no evidence of optimistic updating. They conclude this casts doubt on optimism as a basic feature of healthy cognition.
Written from the abstract, UCL Discovery repository record, 2026-11-03.
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Shah, P., Harris, A. J. L., Bird, G., Catmur, C., & Hahn, U. (2016). A pessimistic view of optimistic belief updating. Cognitive Psychology, 90, 71-127. doi:10.1016/j.cogpsych.2016.05.004 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogpsych.2016.05.004