Armor David A, Sackett Aaron M
Department of Psychology, Yale University, USA.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2006 Oct;91(4):583-600. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.91.4.583.
Participants made predictions about performance on tasks that they did or did not expect to complete. In three experiments, participants in task-unexpected conditions were unrealistically optimistic: They overestimated how well they would perform, often by a large margin, and their predictions were not correlated with their performance. By contrast, participants assigned to task-expected conditions made predictions that were not only less optimistic but strikingly accurate. Consistent with predictions from construal level theory, data from a fourth experiment suggest that it is the uncertainty associated with hypothetical tasks, and not a lack of cognitive processing, that frees people to make optimistic prediction errors. Unrealistic optimism, when it occurs, may be truly unrealistic; however, it may be less ubiquitous than has been previously suggested.
参与者对他们预期或未预期完成的任务表现进行预测。在三项实验中，处于任务意外条件下的参与者表现出不切实际的乐观：他们高估了自己的表现，而且往往高估幅度很大，并且他们的预测与实际表现无关。相比之下，被分配到任务预期条件下的参与者做出的预测不仅不那么乐观，而且惊人地准确。与解释水平理论的预测一致，第四个实验的数据表明，是与假设任务相关的不确定性，而非缺乏认知加工，使人们能够做出乐观的预测错误。不切实际的乐观一旦出现，可能确实不切实际；然而，它可能并不像之前所认为的那样普遍存在。
