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Benefits of the Bright Side
5 September 2017
Eden watched Tali Sharot’s Ted Talk, The Optimism Bias, and learned that she has a tendency to look on the bright side.
Tags: eden read, eden watched, optimism
Have you ever heard of the name-letter effect? I learned about it not too long ago and it explains why it’s no coincidence most of my favorite names begin with the letter E. I have a positive bias toward letters that I find in my own name, and odds are you do, too. Sometimes our biases are easy to recognize because they make perfect sense. In this case, it’s reasonable to attribute my preference for the letter E to the fact that I write four E’s every time I sign my name. However, other times our biases are more complicated than situations of familiarity breeding fondness. That’s one of the things I learned while watching Tali Sharot’s Ted Talk, The Optimism Bias. It’s much harder to perceive our biases when they are not in line with how we see ourselves.
If I’m being honest, the word “optimism” gets a bad rap in my head because I associate it with glossing over reality or failing to take precaution. And I, at least consciously, am extremely partial to precaution. However, the optimism bias goes beyond choosing to see the world through “rose-tinted spectacles.” It is about our ability to anticipate future probabilities. Those of us with an optimism bias “overestimate our likelihood of experiencing good events in our lives and underestimate our likelihood of experiencing bad events.” You probably recognize it as the voice that says, “I know this could happen to someone, but it’s not going to happen to me.”
Overall, listening to this voice is a good thing. In fact, Rachel’s blog post about Sharot’s book discusses many of the benefits of having an optimism bias. Trust me, if you had the choice you wouldn’t want to be without it. At the same time, being unaware of this powerful inner narrative can be a disservice. Our estimates of the future are sometimes offset by unforeseeable events. But other times these offsets stem from predictable and repeated errors on our part and the fact that we don’t know ourselves as well as we think we do.
I recommend watching Sharot’s Ted Talk when you have fifteen minutes and want to learn more about how you can adjust your expectations to make better plans while remaining resilient and hopeful through negative experiences. You might learn that you have an optimism bias, like I did. You might also learn that’s not such a bad thing.
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