Chuck Bryan

And that kind of gets to the basis of this optimism bias that everyone thinks that they're above average in a lot of different ways, which is, of course, impossible because there have to be people who that isn't true for or else there wouldn't be an average.

We'd all be above average.

It's not possible.

And so here's where we get to stop talking about optimists as if they're the greatest thing that ever happened.

Because one of the big problems with optimism is this bias in making terrible predictions about the outcomes of events.

Yeah.

Well, there was another study that kind of tied into that is from Tali Sherat, who's a cognitive neuroscientist at the University College of London, and kind of took that experiment and ran with it and said, all right, I'm going to ask you about the likelihood of something good or bad happening in your life.

Get that answer.

And then they say, well, here's actually the average likelihood of that kind of thing happening.

And now let me ask you again.

And

They found that people changed their answers more in response in the positive way than in the negative way, which I thought was sort of counterintuitive.

It is because you think if you said, like, what's your chances of winning the lottery tomorrow?

And somebody said 80 percent.

And then the people said, actually, it's 90 percent.

They go, great.

Let's say 100 percent for me.

Right.

So that's what people would do.

But if the researchers said, actually, it's more like 20%, they'd be like, no, 80% for me.