Being optimistic can lead to poor decision making: Study – Dainik Savera Times

London: Positive thinking and optimism are often associated with success in life, good health and longevity; But, a new study shows that it can also lead to poor decision-making, which can have a particularly serious impact on people’s financial well-being. In the study published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the UK-based University of Researchers from Bath showed that excessive optimism is actually linked to lower cognitive skills such as verbal fluency, fluid reasoning, numerical reasoning and memory.

Whereas people who are high in cognitive ability are both more realistic and pessimistic in their expectations about the future. “It is difficult to predict with accuracy and this Within reason, we might expect people with lower cognitive abilities to make more errors in both pessimistic and optimistic judgments. But the results are clear: Lower cognitive ability leads to more self-flattering biases, and people inevitably deceive themselves to a degree.”

“Plans based on overly optimistic beliefs are bound to lead to poor decisions and worse outcomes than those based on realistic beliefs,” he said. According to the researchers, planning based on major financial issues such as employment, investment or savings and anything involving risk and uncertainty Also decisions on options were particularly prone to this effect and produced serious implications for individuals. The study took data from over 36,000 households and looked at people’s expectations of financial well-being and compared them to their actual financial outcomes. done.

The study found that those highest in cognitive ability experienced a 22 percent increase in the likelihood of ‘realism’ and a 35 percent decrease in the likelihood of ‘extreme optimism.'” Unrealistic optimism is one of the most widespread human traits and Research has shown that people consistently underestimate the negative and overestimate the positive. The concept of ‘positive thinking’ is almost unquestionably embedded in our culture, Dawson said, and it would be healthy to rethink that belief.