Humans tend to embrace good news, while discounting bad news. We overestimate our odds of winning the lottery or living long lives, while underplaying our risk of cancer, divorce, or unemployment. Now, researchers from University College London (UCL) have found a way of removing these rose-tinted glasses, by aiming a magnetic field at a brain region called the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Their results are published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“So much of the work on psychological biases over the decades has been correlational,” said Dominic Johnson, a political scientist from the University of Oxford, who was not involved in the study. “Here we have a rare example of a direct manipulation experiment. This is a great step forward and promises to open up whole new avenues for research in this area.”
The optimism bias was recognised decades ago, and seems to exist ...
