School of Psychology, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales.
Psychol Rev. 2011 Jan;118(1):135-54. doi: 10.1037/a0020997.
A robust finding in social psychology is that people judge negative events as less likely to happen to themselves than to the average person, a behavior interpreted as showing that people are "unrealistically optimistic" in their judgments of risk concerning future life events. However, we demonstrate how unbiased responses can result in data patterns commonly interpreted as indicative of optimism for purely statistical reasons. Specifically, we show how extant data from unrealistic optimism studies investigating people's comparative risk judgments are plagued by the statistical consequences of sampling constraints and the response scales used, in combination with the comparative rarity of truly negative events. We conclude that the presence of such statistical artifacts raises questions over the very existence of an optimistic bias about risk and implies that to the extent that such a bias exists, we know considerably less about its magnitude, mechanisms, and moderators than previously assumed.
社会心理学中有一个强有力的发现，即人们认为负面事件发生在自己身上的可能性低于发生在普通人身上，这种行为被解释为表明人们在对未来生活事件的风险判断中“不切实际地过于乐观”。然而，我们展示了如何由于纯粹的统计原因，无偏差的反应会导致数据模式通常被解释为乐观的迹象。具体来说，我们展示了如何从对人们比较风险判断的不切实际的乐观主义研究中现有的数据受到抽样限制和使用的反应尺度的统计后果的困扰，再加上真正负面事件的罕见性。我们的结论是，这些统计假象的存在引发了关于风险乐观偏差是否存在的问题，并暗示到目前为止，我们对这种偏差的程度、机制和调节因素的了解要比之前假设的少得多。
