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Optimism as a Prior Belief about the Probability of Future Reward

• seventytwo 12y ago
  Not sure I follow everything here... Anyone with a better background in this field give a summary?
• rudimental 12y ago
  "...trait optimism doesn't distort how new information is integrated: subjects update their estimates similarly following information that is better or worse than expected." Are people with high trait optimism disappointed to a greater extent than others? They have to adjust their expectations further to align them with reality/ the results. Can optimism lead to better outcomes? Can belief in a greater likelihood of the reward lead to it happening? Probably doesn't apply to lotteries and similar situations. Edit: fixed punctuation.
  • icegreentea 12y ago
    It's probably worth looking at optimism across multiple independent processes. As a proportion of human interaction, I would wager that processes which are percievably stationary (or stationary enough), and that a human will interact with over and over again is actually relatively small. I would hypothesize that had this task been set up with 'moving parts', then optimists could rationalize away their expectations as 'this time it's different'. I think ultimately, optimism 'works' not because it influences the probability of events happening, but because it influences the distribution of 'payoffs'.