Sumit Paul-Choudhury
speaker
54 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Sumit Paul-Choudhury’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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People who are strongly optimistic tend to live longer, they tend to be healthier, they tend to be more successful. People who score high on pessimism, that associates quite strongly with depression, and depression is characterized, among other things, by an inability to see that there is any other way forward.
What is it? Well, one of the reasons I kind of started looking into this subject is because, actually, I think we all kind of think we know what optimism is. We kind of think it's this sort of general attitude that life will go all right and things will work themselves out. But when you start digging into it, you find there are actually kind of several distinct flavors of optimism.
There's a psychological version of optimism. There's a philosophical version of optimism. And then there's kind of a practical version of optimism. And they kind of flow on from each other. The psychological definition of it is essentially having expectations about the future that are not supportable by the available evidence.
So you think things are going to go well, even when you don't have evidence that testifies to that or demonstrates that's going to be true.
Is that a safe assumption? It's one of those things. It's a safe assumption except when it isn't. One of the things I dug into was the evolutionary origins of optimism and why it seems to be that we have this innate, very widespread tendency to look on the bright side and why that seems to be part of the human condition.
And actually goes beyond the human condition, because actually you also find that animals are optimistic or they express kind of biases in the way they look at the world that reflects what we would think of as optimism. So you can, for example, you can do an experiment with chickens in which you train basically chicks to associate, say, a black card with food and a white card with no food.
So, you know, if they move a black card, there'll be food behind it. If they move the white card, there won't be. And once they're trained to do this, you show them a grey card and you see what they do. And what happens is that most chickens tend to go for the grey card, which basically means they think, well, it's probably going to have food.
It's more likely to have food behind it than it's not, which is essentially an animal version, a chicken version of optimism. And when you start looking around, you discover that lots of animals do this. All sorts of animals, kind of the clever animals you might expect, like monkeys and dolphins and dogs.
But also, as I say, chickens, sheep, even animals that we think of as being really simple, like bumblebees, express this kind of bias. And the most compelling explanation I found for this is that essentially you need something to motivate you to take action when you don't know what the future holds. When you're presented with an ambiguous situation.
When you don't know what the answer is, when you have a grey card, or in the human case, when you have a glass half full of water. Obviously nobody ever does that experiment, but you understand the point. If you have the half glass of water and you have to decide if it's half full or half empty, there isn't actually a good answer to that. There's no meaningful answer to that.
You have to make a call of some decision. In kind of the long run, if you don't do anything every time you're presented with that kind of situation, you're gonna go extinct. You're not gonna thrive if every time you don't know what's gonna happen next, you do nothing. That isn't a recipe for success.
So optimism, and most of the time in life, we're faced with situations where we don't know what's gonna come next, not in detail. We may have an idea, and humans are better than most species, obviously, at figuring out what's coming next. But most of the time, we don't have enough information to know what's coming next. So you have to have something that makes you act.
And essentially, if you kind of work through the logic of this, if we make the right kind of mistake or you make the right kind of assumption, as long as the negative effects are that small, every now and again the positives are large. So you can think about this in all sorts of circumstances in your life, really.
I mean, if you apply for many jobs, for example, that you're not very likely to get, fair enough, most of the time you won't get them, but you haven't expended much beyond the cost of applying for those jobs. When you get one that is transformative for your life, on the other hand, it transforms your life.
And so then when you look back at this, of course, you say, well, things did mostly work out. You know, things have worked out pretty well. And that's kind of optimism working on an incremental step-by-step basis. One of the psychological ways of looking at optimism is explanatory style, which is say, do you look back at your life and think things worked out well?
Or do you look back at your life and think they didn't work out so well? Most people tend to go for the optimistics end of things.
A bit of both. So like most psychological traits, or most traits in general, it's a mixture of your inheritance, your genetic inheritance, and your environment. In the case of optimism, it seems to be a bit more about experience than it is about genetics. Your genetics sort of account for a decent chunk of your level of optimism as an adult, but not the majority of it.
Your experiences in your environment seem to play quite a significant role in molding your optimism. And the pattern tends to be that young children are hyper-optimistic. They're extremely optimistic. And you can kind of understand why that would be because You think about the challenges a little kid, I mean, a really small child faces. You know, they can't speak. They have no motor control.
They can't feed themselves. They're essentially helpless. But from there, they have to get to a position where they can do all those things, where they can stand, they can walk, they can eat, they can talk, they can eventually write and tie their shoelaces and all those kinds of things.
And if you did not expect that you were going to succeed, you know, I mean, if you didn't think you would succeed at managing those tasks, even though when you start out, you have absolutely no ability to do them and no way to communicate with anyone about them. you know, you would get nowhere, right?
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