The phrase "hey I got something to eat today" was meant to be our paeleolithic ancestors on whom all our modern human reactions are based - we evolved in a worl

The phrase "hey I got something to eat today" was meant to be our paeleolithic ancestors on whom all our modern human reactions are based - we evolved in a world that had (say) equal amounts of good (berries !) and bad (snake!) - so our optimism and pessimism had equal workouts in the environment now I would suggest our pessimism gets much more work out However an interesting podcast (frwkonnomics) has someone last week saying their research showed that we are more pessimistic when stressed and more optimistic when less stressed (indicating that perhaps it is just the stress of the information overload leading to pessimism rather than the information content)