Studies 2-4 directly tested the moderation effect, and unlike prior work focusing on expectations for purely stochastic events, the present studies involved more naturalistic events for which likelihood information was not supplied or directly knowable. Study 1 confirmed the connotation difference, with predictions being viewed as more affording of hunches. The authors proposed that solicitations of predictions and likelihood judgments have different connotations that ultimately affect how much bias is expressed this varies from a prior account that attributed the moderation effect to response scale differences (dichotomous vs. The present studies extended the generalizability and understanding of the moderating process. Prior work has provided limited evidence that the magnitude of this motivated bias depends on (is moderated by) how expectations are solicited-as discrete outcome predictions or as likelihood judgments expressed on more continuous scales. The desirability bias refers to when people's expectations about an uncertain event are biased by outcome preferences. 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. 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. However, we demonstrate how unbiased responses can result in data patterns commonly interpreted as indicative of optimism for purely statistical reasons. 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.

Unrealistic optimism social psychology