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The brain's rose-colored glasses

Nature Neuroscience volume 14, pages 1355–1356 (2011)Cite this article

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People tend to remain overly optimistic even when faced with information about a gloomy future. A study now shows that people are selectively worse at incorporating information about a worse-than-expected future. It also describes the learning signals in the brain that correlate with this bias.

Most of us consistently underestimate the probability of something bad happening to us: stock market crashes, experiment failures and manuscript rejections often seem subjectively unlikely1,2. Although unrealistic, such optimism is pervasive across societies and has implications for a wide range of domains, from individual health to politics and finance. It was recently shown3 that optimism bias correlates with the activation of brain structures such as the anterior cingulate cortex and amygdala, but the manner in which it is propagated in the face of disconfirming information has remained elusive. A study by Sharot et al.4 now finds that optimists' brains fail to generate a learning signal when confronted with the evidence that negative events are more likely to occur than predicted.

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Figure 1: People are biased toward unrealistically optimistic views about their own future, an effect known as the optimism bias.

W.B. Park

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Keise Izuma and Ralph Adolphs are in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California, USA.,

    Keise Izuma & Ralph Adolphs

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  1. Keise Izuma
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  2. Ralph Adolphs
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Correspondence to Keise Izuma or Ralph Adolphs.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Izuma, K., Adolphs, R. The brain's rose-colored glasses. Nat Neurosci 14, 1355–1356 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2960

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