Positive illusions

People often hold beliefs about themselves, the world, and the future which are more positive than reality can sustain. These beliefs are called positive illusions.

What positive illusions do people hold?

Three types of positive illusions have been documented: self-aggrandizing self-perceptions (the above-average effect, where people consistently regard themselves more positively and less negatively than they regard others, and than others regard them), perceptions of mastery (where most people believe that they can exert more personal control over environmental circumstances than is actually the case), and unrealistic optimism (optimism bias, where people are optimistic and believe that the present is better than the past, and the future will be better than the present). For example, people could overestimate the likelihood that they will experience a wide variety of pleasant events, such as enjoying their first job or having a gifted child, and somewhat underestimate their risk of succumbing to negative events, such as getting divorced or falling victim to a chronic disease.

What are some common examples of positive illusions in everyday life? If you make a list of the things you want to accomplish in a day, but find that you have completed far fewer than you had expected by the end of the day, you are probably showing unrealistic optimism, a positive illusion about your productivity. If you bet on an otherwise unfancied sports team because you have a hunch that they will pull off an upset, you are almost certainly showing a positive illusion. You may of course be right some of the time, but looked at from the standpoint of its objective likelihood, your belief could correctly be considered illusory.

Positive illusions and mental health

Why do people hold positive illusions? One reason is that positive beliefs could be tied to psychological wellbeing. The reference to wellbeing here means the ability to feel good about oneself, to be creative and/or productive in one’s work, to form satisfying relationships with other people and to effectively combat stress when necessary. Positive illusions are particularly useful for helping people to get through major stressful events or traumas, such as life-threatening illnesses or serious accidents. People who are able to develop or maintain their positive beliefs in the face of these potential setbacks tend to cope more successfully with them, and show less psychological distress than those less able. For example, psychological research shows that cancer survivors often report a higher quality of life than people who have never had cancer at all. This could be because they have been able to use the traumatic experience to evoke an increased sense of meaning and purpose.

People also hold positive illusions because such beliefs often enhance their productivity and persistence with tasks on which they might otherwise give up. When people believe they can achieve a difficult goal, this expectation often creates a sense of energy and excitement, the fuel needed to persist in order to bring goals to realization. Even though people sometimes fall short of achieving all they set out to do, a positive illusion may help them to make more progress than would otherwise have been the case. Think, for example, of a day in which you made a long list of things to do. At the end of the day, there were probably things still left undone, but you almost certainly got through more than you would have done with a more realistic list, comprising maybe three or four things, or without a list at all.

Finally, positive illusions are adaptive because they enable people to feel hopeful in the face of uncontrollable risks. This process may help to keep people from becoming immobilized or depressed by seemingly insurmountable obstacles.

Potential liabilities of positive illusions

There are several potential risks that may arise if people hold positive illusions about their personal qualities and likely outcomes. The first is that they set themselves up for unpleasant surprises for which they are ill-prepared when their overly optimistic beliefs are disconfirmed. Research suggests that (for the most part), these adverse outcomes do not occur. People’s beliefs are more realistic at times when realism serves them particularly well - for example: when initially making plans; when accountability is likely or following negative feedback from the environment. Following a setback or failure, all is still not lost, as people’s overly positive beliefs may be used again in a new undertaking (Armor & Taylor, 1998).

A second risk is that people who hold positive illusions will set goals, or undertake courses of actions which are more likely to produce failure than success. This concern appears to be largely without basis. Research shows that when people are deliberating future courses of actions for themselves, such as whether to take a particular job or go to graduate school, their perceptions are fairly realistic, but they can become overly optimistic when they turn to implementing their plans. The shift from realism to optimism may provide the fuel needed to bring potentially difficult tasks from conception to fruition (Taylor & Gollwitzer, 1995).

A third risk is that positive self-perceptions may have social costs. People who are self-promoting in public situations, in all likelihood, turn other people off. Initially, their upbeat optimistic nature may endear them to others, but over time, other people can become aware of this self-absorption, and consequently turn away from them. People who hold overly positive self-assessments privately, however, do not necessarily turn others off, and indeed, the opposite can be true. They can make positive impressions on others, be well liked by their friends, and strike clinicians and peers as mentally healthy. One might say that it is all right to "think" you are better than others, as long as you do not obviously "act" that way.

A potential limitation of positive illusions concerns their cultural prevalence. Although it is easy to document positive illusions in Western cultures, people in East Asian cultures are much less likely to self-enhance and indeed, are often self-effacing instead. Positive illusions may nonetheless be manifested in group-enhancing biases, and may also be privately held (rather than publicly voiced) in East Asian cultures.

Positive illusions and physical health

The ability to develop and sustain positive beliefs in the face of setbacks has health benefits. Research with men who were HIV seropositive, or already diagnosed with AIDS, has shown that those who hold unrealistically positive assessments of their abilities to control their health conditions take longer to develop symptoms, and experience a slower course of illness. Men with AIDS who held overly positive beliefs about their ability to combat their illness lived (on average) 2 years longer than men who were more pessimistic about their circumstances.

Origins of positive illusions

Where do positive illusions come from? Research suggests that there may be modest genetic contributions to the ability to develop positive illusions. Early environment also plays an important role: people are more able to develop these positive beliefs in nurturing environments than in harsh ones. Gene-environment interactions may also play a role.

Can positive illusions be learned? There is no reason to think that positive illusions cannot be taught, and indeed, many well-established therapies involving teaching people to think better of themselves, their circumstances, and their outcomes may rely (at least in part) on instilling a somewhat illusory positive glow about oneself in the world.

Research contributors to this field include David Armor, Jonathon Brown, Julienne Bower, Suzanne Segerstrom, Shelley Taylor and Vickie Helgesen.

See also

*Mental health
*Positive psychology
*Psychological resilience
*Quality of life

External links

* [http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/images/TimeMagazine/Time-Happiness.pdf Time Magazine 2005 cover story on Positive Psychology]

*“ [http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/magazine/21wwln_lede.t.html You are what you expect] ” New York Times article by Jim Holt

References

*Armor, D.A. et al. (2002). When predictions fail: The dilemma of unrealistic optimism. In T. Gilovich, D. Griffin, & D. Kahneman (Eds.) Heuristics and Biases: The Psychology of Intuitive Judgment (pp. 334-347). New York, NY: Cambridge University Press.

*Bower, J.E., et al. (1998). Cognitive processing, discovery of meaning, CD 4 decline, and AIDS-related mortality among bereaved HIV-seropositive men. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 66, 979-986.

*Fiske, S. T., & Taylor, S. E. (in press). Social cognition (3rd ed.). New York: Random House.

*Reed, G.M. et al. (1994). "Realistic acceptance" as a predictor of decreased survival time in gay men with AIDS. Health Psychology, 13, 299-307.

*Reed, G.M. et al. (1999). Negative HIV-specific expectancies and AIDS-related bereavement as predictors of symptom onset in asymptomatic HIV-positive gay men. Health Psychology, 18, 354-363.

*Segerstrom, S.C. et al. (1998). Optimism is associated with mood, coping, and immune change in response to stress. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 1646-1655.

*Taylor, S.E., & Brown, J. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103, 193-210.