Egocentrism as a Source of Unrealistic Optimism

Abstract

People tend to expect misfortunes to happen to others, not to themselves. College students (n = 76) who compared their own chances of experiencing 6 negative events with the chances of their classmates were optimistically biased (p < .001). Treatments were designed to manipulate 2 cognitive. factors-lack of information about others' risk-reducing factors and failure to think carefully about others-that might cause these biases. The Information treatment. forced subjects to think about others by providing detailed information about 5 other students. The Perspective treatment used a role-playing procedure to, force subjects to think about another student, but did not provide actual information. When repeating their comparative risk judgments for the same events, both Information and Perspective groups were significantly less optimistic than a control condition, but they did not differ from one another. The results support the hypothesis that egocentrism contributes to unrealistic optimism. They, suggest that optimistic biases do not result so much from a lack of information about other people as from a failure to think carefully about others' circumstances.