Yet area home owners estimated only a 27% chance that their own home would have a radon problem ( Weinstein & Lyon, 1999). For example, field measurements found that 73% of homes in Columbus, Ohio had elevated radon levels. Investigations have also demonstrated unrealistic absolute optimism when comparing people's estimates with population base rates.
Other studies demonstrate that financial advisors are overly optimistic in their economic predictions ( Calderon, 1993) and that people in general are quite unrealistic in their estimates of the time it will take to complete a task ( Newby-Clark, Ross, Buehler, Koehler, & Griffin, 2000), a misjudgment known as the planning fallacy. For example, several studies compared personal predictions with the outcomes that actually transpired, such as exam grades or starting salaries after college graduation ( Shepperd, Ouellette, & Fernandez, 1996). Researchers have demonstrated unrealistic absolute optimism using many criteria. The first type is unrealistic absolute optimism, which refers to an unjustified belief that a personal outcome will be more favorable than the outcomes indicated by a quantitative objective standard (such as epidemiological or base-rate data). Researchers distinguish between two types of unrealistic optimism that differ in the standard against which personal predictions are compared ( Shepperd et al., 2013). The concept is distinct both empirically ( Davidson & Prkachin, 1997) and conceptually from dispositional optimism, a personality trait representing generally positive expectations about the future. Unrealistic optimism also occurs when people unduly predict that their personal outcomes will be more favorable than the outcomes of peers ( Shepperd et al., 2013). People are considered unrealistically optimistic if they predict that a personal future outcome will be more favorable than that suggested by a relevant, objective standard. In this brief primer we address four questions: What is unrealistic optimism? When do people display unrealistic optimism? Why do people display unrealistic optimism? What are the consequences of unrealistic optimism? This primer is designed to provide a snapshot of the field 35 years after publication of the paper that coined the term unrealistic optimism ( Weinstein, 1980). The same optimistic propensity appears for desirable events such as graduating from college, getting married, and having favorable medical outcomes (e.g., Weinstein, 1980). Researchers have documented this unrealistic optimism in over a thousand studies and for a diverse array of undesirable events including diseases, natural disasters, and a host of other events ranging from unwanted pregnancies and home radon contamination to the end of romantic relationships ( Shepperd, Klein, Waters, & Weinstein, 2013). People tend to display a remarkable propensity toward excessive optimism, predicting futures that are often quite unrealistically positive.
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