– In which Dorn loses THE argument with Kathleen.
One of the things I like to feel smug about is my enlightened skeptical view toward my own beliefs. I have even started accumulating notes for a blog post on healthy self-doubt. I’ve already got a cool quote to use by Oliver Wendall Holmes, “Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not true” (from a Wash Post review of Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas by Stephen Budiansky). I’m debating whether to include in that blog post the concept of confirmation bias, where we reinforce our own beliefs by hungrily ingesting supporting evidence, but ignoring, to the extent we can, any contrary evidence.
I’m also an optimist. Some might say smugly so, certainly intentionally so. I work hard at it. Many’s the time when Kathleen and I have debated philosophical points that she’s said, “You’re such an optimist!”. “No, you’re just a pessimist!”, I might reply. “I’m not a pessimist, I’m a realist.” “No, I’m the realist.” “Are not” “Am too” “Am not” “Are too” and so forth.
My smugnitude was tested recently. I was poking a stick into the internets to see what I might pry out, and I found a scholarly review article, “Costs and benefits of realism and optimism” (Curr Opin Psychiatry. 2015 Mar; 28(2): 194–198.) In it, I found that “unrealistic optimism”, also referred to as “optimism bias”, is “a robust phenomenon across a variety of tasks and domains” that is accepted widely enough to be the topic of multiple papers in psychiatry and philosophy. Uh-oh, I don’t like where this is going!
Apparently, the question of whether unrealistic optimism exists has long been settled (“yes”), and now thinkers are pondering whether it actually does any good. There is a theory, which the paper didn’t really embrace, that unrealistic optimism, while making one’s view of the world and his or her place in it less accurate, nevertheless conveys some sort of benefit to the optimist.
The notion of “benefit” was picked apart. Does unrealistic optimism make you feel better, psychologically or maybe even biologically? Or does it make your situation (in society, for example) objectively better? Philosopher types talked of “epistemic” benefits, which as near as I can understand means it gets you closer to evidence-based truth.
It is well-known in clinical circles that people experiencing depression tend to have a more realistic understanding of some situations, such as their own present and probable future well-being, than people, including optimists, without the condition. Most people, and especially optimists, apparently underestimate with alarming predictability the chances that something bad will ever happen to them.
This put me in a real spot. Do I stand up against confirmation bias, and accept that I have optimism bias? Or do I give in to it, and continue to tell myself that my optimism is real realism, and just ignore any evidence to the contrary?
Well, I did what any thinker would do in such a situation: I scoured (well, I browsed) the internet for more evidence that supported the conclusion that I wanted to believe. Okay, so “unrealistic optimism” is a thing. It will take me a while to un-learn that, but maybe it’s counterbalanced by “unrealistic pessimism”? If I can’t win my philosophical debate with Kathleen, maybe I can at least tie?
Turns out there’s a lot less discussion of unrealistic pessimism out there. It exists, apparently, but only in extreme situations. I found the abstract to an article, “Unrealistic Pessimism”, from the Journal of Social Psychology, Jul 1, 2010: 511-516. Here’s the abstract in its damning entirety:
Various data suggest that individuals tend to be unrealistically optimistic about the future. People believe that negative events are less likely to happen to them than to others. The present study examined if the optimistic bias could be demonstrated if a threat is not (as it has been researched up to the present) potential, incidental, and familiar, but real, common, and unfamiliar. The present research was conducted after the explosion at the atomic power station in Chernobyl, and it was concerned with the perception of threat to one’s own and to others’ health due to consequences of radiation. The female subjects believed that their own chance of experiencing such health problems were better than the chances of others. Thus, in these specific conditions, unrealistic optimism was not only reduced but the reverse effect was obtained: unrealistic pessimism.
So it would take a Chernobyl-scale event for me to even score a draw in the philosophical debate with Kathleen I mentioned earlier. I’m sunk. The only thing I can think of to do is to drop my smug superiority of my mastery over confirmation bias, ignore the facts and try to retain some shred of my optimism bias so I don’t get trounced too badly by Kathleen. And I’ll either fail, and be able once again to feel smug about my optimism, or I’ll succeed, and be able to feel smug about conquering my former smugness about my optimism. It’s a win-win! (It’s working already!).
Here’s a funny comic about confirmation bias from a funny online strip, Wondermark.
Thanks,
Dorn
9/22/2019
PS. On reviewing this post, Kathleen points out that her arguments wouldn’t seem so pessimistic if she didn’t have to spend so much time injecting reality into my optimism. How can I answer that, now that Science has confirmed it?
Here’s a joke from Kathleen:
