Naturally optimistic people always look at the good side of things and ignore the bad. A new study from the UK shows that this optimism is indeed “natural” because their brains have a preference for processing information in a way that naturally “reports the good rather than the bad”.
Researchers at University College London and other institutions report in the new issue of Nature Neuroscience that they asked volunteers to participate in an experiment to test this brain preference. The volunteers first looked at a series of negative events, such as a burglary or an illness, and then assessed the probability of those events happening to them. Later the researchers would tell the volunteers the average probability of that event occurring, replay the events in question, and ask the volunteers to assess the odds of them happening to them again.
The results showed that if subjects started with a more pessimistic estimate than the average probability, the brain received the equivalent of good news when it saw the average probability and revised its estimate substantially; but if they started with a more optimistic estimate than the average probability, the average probability given was equivalent to bad news, and the brain did not make much of a correction.
In the case of cancer, for example, if a subject starts with a 40% chance of getting cancer, he or she will adjust his or her estimate to 32% after learning that the actual average probability is 30%; but if he or she starts with a 10% chance of getting cancer, he or she will be less willing to adjust the estimate higher.
While this tendency to “report good news but not bad news” was found in general, it was particularly pronounced among optimists. The researchers used a separate psychological questionnaire to assess the optimism of the subjects and scanned the brain’s frontal lobe activity with magnetic resonance imaging while they were taking these tests. The frontal lobe is the part of the brain responsible for processing relevant information.
The results showed that the frontal lobes were active in all people when they received good news, but not to the same extent when they received bad news, with optimists having particularly low frontal lobe activity, showing that their brains naturally want to “filter out” the bad news, and optimists ending up adjusting their self-estimates based on the bad news. The optimists also had the least amount of self-assessment in response to bad news.
Researcher Tali Sharot said that optimism has some benefits, such as optimists tend to have less anxiety and better mental health, but it also has disadvantages, such as being less likely to take precautions for possible risks, which can have serious consequences if they occur. So while optimism is associated with inherent characteristics of brain activity, people should still go about trying to assess risks properly.