It is hard to tell if a chicken is an optimist. After all, you can’t ask it if a glass of water is half full or half empty. But you can repeatedly show it a white card in front of a bowl of tasty mealworms and a black card in front of an empty bowl. Once a chick has learned to reliably choose the white card, you show it a grey card. Chicks that head immediately for this card apparently surmise that it is more white than black, and thus probably contains food – the equivalent of deeming a glass half full. On this basis, .
You can test optimism-like behaviour in many animals – and even fine-tune it. European starlings . Bottlenose dolphins . Bumblebees .
Advertisement
These findings might seem eccentric, but the fact that optimism, of a sort, appears in such a wide range of animals suggests that a positive outlook might be important in our own lives – and that it is deeply connected to our well-being. In recent years, these and other insights into how a glass-half-full way of thinking can affect our health have begun to help us distinguish different types of optimism. This, in turn, has allowed us to identify types that are good for us, and even understand how to train ourselves to become the right kind of positive thinker.
For many, this might seem dubious, for reasons that go back centuries. As I explore in my book, The Bright Side, optimism didn’t start out as a psychological concept, but as a philosophical one. Its origins lie in an attempt by the 18th-century polymath Gottfried Leibniz to explain why an all-knowing, all-powerful and all-loving God allows evil to exist. His suggestion was that if you dispelled evil in one particular instance, you might end up doing more harm in the greater scheme of things. Drawing on insights provided by his invention of calculus, he – that we live not in a perfect world, but the “best of all possible worlds”, meaning the one that was most harmonious and logically consistent.
Are we delusional?
This bold explanation was an early attempt at what we would now consider a scientific theory of cosmology, and one whose suggestion of multiple universes prefigures the concept of the multiverse. But not everyone was impressed. The French satirist Voltaire wrote a vicious parody of Leibniz into his 1759 . His Doctor Pangloss insists that “all is for the best, in this best of all possible worlds” throughout many dire trials and tribulations. By the end, Pangloss looks like a fool and his philosophy is rejected as nonsense. It was hardly a fair critique of Leibniz’s thesis, but it stuck, and optimism has carried connotations of naivety and delusion ever since.
That was one reason it took a long time for psychologists to examine optimism properly. But when they did, the results supported the idea that we are fairly delusional about our futures. In a , at Rutgers University in New Jersey asked more than 200 people to estimate their chances of experiencing 42 different life scenarios. Some were positive, like owning their own home or receiving an award for their work; others were negative, like getting divorced or having a heart attack. Most people turned out to significantly overestimate their likelihood of experiencing happiness, health and success, and rated their chances of experiencing negative events as below average.
While it is striking that people tend to consistently err on the bright side, these unrealistically positive expectations may not come from conscious estimation but from sheer ineptitude with probabilities. It takes a lot of data and modelling to make accurate estimates of the chances of a car crash or cancer diagnosis, for example. But studies also show that this bias is persistent: even when we are given accurate information about our chances, we tend to pay more attention if it supports our optimism than if it contradicts it.
It is hard to see how making poor estimates could be good for us, though, and indeed there are indications that people whose estimates are the least accurate – who are strongly optimistic about specific situations, in other words – may be preventative measures or listen to health advice. “It never did my grandad any harm” or “I can give up whenever I like” pretty much sum it up. Researchers have also found links between , including problem gambling. Then there’s the “planning fallacy”, the tendency of optimists to assume everything will go smoothly. This might mean they are never on time or their work projects run wildly over budget.
So why haven’t we evolved to make more realistic judgements of our futures? In 2009, the late Daniel Dennett and psychologist at Royal Holloway, University of London,. To do this, they considered whether there might be an evolutionary advantage in holding various kinds of “misbelief” – objectively unsupportable beliefs, such as the existence of supernatural entities. It turned out that one kind did fit the bill, a family of misbeliefs called “positive illusions”: our tendency to overestimate our own abilities, control over situations and expectations of the future. In short, optimism.
Dennett and McKay suggested that positive illusions help us strive for goals that might otherwise seem out of reach; ensure that we perceive our children and partners as exceptional and worthy of our love and care; and enable us to moderate the stress we experience when we encounter difficulties.
There is no consensus as to whether this really is the basis for optimism – the evolutionary rationale for psychological traits and their resulting behaviours is notoriously hard to pin down. But perhaps we can take a leaf out of Leibniz’s book and ask whether our inability to assess risk and reward in a particular situation might prove beneficial over the many varied opportunities and challenges we face through the course of a lifetime. Perhaps optimism helps us lead optimal lives, not perfect ones. After all, evolution doesn’t care about what you die of as long as you’ve done the work of having and raising offspring before you do. And that involves making a great many decisions about a great many situations. Erring on the positive with each of those might cumulatively deliver significant benefit.
The benefits of optimism
A few years after Weinstein’s study, the psychologists Michael Scheier and Charles Carver devised a short questionnaire that explores this possibility. The asks people not about specific events, but about how they generally look at life. The test’s simplicity has made it enormously popular with researchers for decades, and it has now been used in thousands of studies investigating everything from the coping strategies of people with cancer to the success of stage magicians. Many of those studies have found that this kind of general, dispositional optimism seems to be beneficial – physically, professionally and personally.
This goes some way to explaining the studies showing that optimists fare better when it comes to , and , and cope better with , as well as with the consequences of extreme events like . There is evidence of similar patterns in the professional sphere: optimists tend to be high achievers at school and work, enjoy more job satisfaction and cope more effectively with drastic setbacks like the covid-19 pandemic. They do better socially, too: people like being around optimists and optimists have more .
Our default optimism levels are probably set during adolescence
When looked at in this way, the consensus is that optimists tend to enjoy longer, happier and healthier lives – despite making the odd risky decision and being prone to ignore health advice. The reverse is true for people who score low on optimism and high on pessimism in psychological assessments, which, at the extreme, is strongly associated with mental health conditions, notably depression.
Putting all this together, it seems that while taking an overly optimistic view of a specific event or experience might not work to our advantage, holding generally positive expectations seems to be associated with good outcomes.
But where does our innate optimism come from? And if we are low on it, can we retune it, as it appears we can in dolphins, starlings and bumblebees? Like most psychological traits, our levels of optimism are determined both by our genes and our environment, but what we learn from our experiences seems to be the more important factor.
Children start out boundlessly optimistic: if you think about the magnitude of the challenges they face, they have to be. But over time, that . Exactly how optimism changes through our adolescence and early adulthood is unclear, although it appears to throughout our youth and it seems likely that our “default” levels of optimism are set during this time.
How to become an optimist
What if we want to be more optimistic? Just asking people to think about the future , as can techniques as simple as giving them cues such as . There are also drugs that achieve the same effect. L-dopa, a chemical that increases dopamine activity in the brain, can boost positive expectations of the future, for instance.
Unfortunately, increases in optimism that last longer than a week or so have proven more elusive, with researchers trialling a , including mindfulness and meditaÂtion as well as more esoteric approaches such as sensory deprivation.
A more plausible contender is the Best Possible Self exercise, invented by at the University of Missouri. The idea is to spend 15 minutes a day writing about the version of yourself in a future where everything has gone right: all your efforts have paid off and you have accomplished everything you ever wanted to. Then you spend 5 minutes imagining that future. Studies so far have examined the effects of doing this for a week or two, and found that the positive impact is modest and melts away within another week or so. Psychologists are now trying to figure out if practising this technique more routinely can make the gains more permanent.
For longer-lasting increases in optimism, the answer may lie within – and that brings us to yet another way of looking at optimism. University of Pennsylvania researcher , the so-called father of positive psychology, thinks that we learn to explain events, particularly negative ones, in characteristic ways. An optimist, by Seligman’s reckoning, tends to think that such events are the result of transient factors, typically external to themselves, and specific to a particular situation. So, for instance, if an optimist fails a job interview, they might chalk it up to an off day: they were feeling tired or the interviewer was biased. A pessimist, on the other hand, would consider it to be just one more example of their general lack of charisma and inability to perform under pressure.
If you are in the latter camp, the solution, according to Seligman, is to practise something he calls the ABCDE approach, in which you challenge your own pessimistic thoughts when they arise. In his book Learned Optimism, Seligman gives the example of a person who has lost an expensive earring borrowed from a friend – that’s A, for Adversity. B is for their Belief that their friend will be justifiably furious with them for this characteristic irresponsibility. C is for Consequences: feeling sick and stupid. Next is the critical Disputation stage, in which they aim to re-evaluate their thought process by acknowledging that the friend will be disappointed, but also that they will most likely realise it was just one of those unfortunate accidents. E is for Energisation: they dust themselves off and move on.
The disputation stage of Seligman’s approach is really just a variation on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), which teaches people to recognise and change patterns of negative thought and behaviour. CBT is widely used and can be effective for depression, so it makes sense for the ABCDE approach to increase optimism. There are few studies looking at this, but to work, the ABCDE method would probably need to be practised routinely and regularly until it becomes second nature.
The optimism gap
Boosting our optimism for the long term is one challenge. Yet we also need to make it broader. We tend to be optimistic about our own lives. We are also optimistic, although less so, about our family and friends. We are even willing to extend our positive expectations to people who aren’t close to us, but who we regard as likeable and competent. Widen it further, however, and our optimism shifts to negativity. Although we are inclined to believe that we and those around us are doing fine, we tend not to believe that society on a broader level is doing well. And when asked about our expectations of the world, we are .
This has been widening in recent years – most strikingly among younger people – and expanding to cover not just economics but also crime, the environment and health, all areas in which we seem unable to extend positivity about our personal experience to the world at large. That matters, because what goes for us as individuals might also apply to our societies: optimism could give us the strength to seek out and devise solutions to our collective problems. So, maybe we need to believe in optimism’s power not only to change our own lives, but to do so for all our lives. Or to put it another way: we need to be optimistic about the power of optimism.
