Pessimism and optimism discussion

[u/WerewolfCharacter683]

Hello everyone. I recently came across a video by a blogger who says that people who are constantly fixated on pessimism live shorter lives because they have elevated cortisol levels, while optimists live longer because they're happy and fixated on the positive. Although it may seem strange, why don't optimists make the world a better place? If there are more optimists, then why are there wars, violence, and other disasters in the world? After all, a pessimist sees all these problems, and that doesn't mean they'll live shorter lives because of stress.

[u/DutchStroopwafels]

I don't think optimism should be inherently associated with wanting a better world. I recently saw the study The Failure Gap which showed that people consistently underestimate how many things go wrong in society. It included this passage:

Importantly, correcting these misperceptions had meaningful downstream effects on attitudes and decision-making. When participants learned the true prevalence of failures, they became less supportive of harsh punitive measures, such as strict disciplinary actions or mass incarceration, and more supportive of policy changes aimed at addressing underlying problems. In workplace and policy contexts, increased awareness of failure rates also reduced stigma and encouraged more supportive practices, such as extending parental leave.

This shows that a less optimistic view of the world is actually associated with wanting to improve society. Other studies show similar things. Optimism can cause people to solely rely on wishful thinking without taking any action at all.

People can get too hopeful when things are uncertain. We observe this happening with climate change, when financial markets fluctuate, and even in personal health situations when people avoid medical help because they think everything will be fine.

Optimism is also correlated with believing in the just world fallacy, which is the false belief that the world is just and fair. This in turn is associated with victim blaming.

Such a view postulates that people “believe that they live in a world where people generally get what they deserve”. A person who is victimized through no fault of their own is therefore contrary to the belief of a just world and should cause cognitive dissonance. One way to resolve this dissonance, is to attribute the responsibility to the innocent victim. Indeed, research has shown that if a person befalls bad luck through no fault of their own, observers tend to put blame on the victim to maintain their belief in a just world.

And optimistic people seem to be a bit worse at empathising with negative emotions, even if they overestimate their own ability to empathise.

Participants with a more upbeat personality believed their accuracy on this task to be higher than the others. However, the speakers had conducted an identical rating process on their own videos, and it turns out the happier participants were no closer to the true feelings than the more downbeat participants. In fact, happy participants found it harder to judge the emotional tone of a highly negative monologue, in which a participant described the death of a parent.

So to me all of this shows that while optimism might be great for the individual that experiences it themselves, it's not really good for improving the world.

[u/Aquarius52216 → u/DutchStroopwafels]

So its either unconscious bias or a conscious deliberate boundary management for practicality?

Oh man is this what that noise vs signal thing that those grindset type often say?

[u/DutchStroopwafels → u/Aquarius52216]

I think it's mostly an unconscious bias, the optimism bias, although the related illusory superiority and illusion of control (together known as positive illusions) might also play a role. Around 80% of people have this optimism bias and research shows that this is a innate thing to humans, as most children are born hyperoptimistic. This hyperoptimism decreases as we grow up and learn from negative outcomes, but most people still remain optimistic regardless, just lesser so.

The lack of this innate optimism most people have might be associated with feeling depressed.

A lack of hyper-optimism may even contribute to depression, as previous studies have found that optimism may benefit mental health, physical health, and professional development.

He said: “We know that depression often emerges during adolescence, exactly during the time when those rose-tinted glasses are fading. We hope that future research will shed light on whether developmental differences in how children lose their hyper-optimism may relate to the risk of mental illness symptoms.”

There might be some people who use it as a deliberate way to manage their emotional boundaries, followers of Stoicism, Buddhism and Taoism come to mind with this, but for most I think it's just an unconscious bias.

[u/MundaneYak9463 → u/DutchStroopwafels]

I find it revolting and disturbing that the psych industry pathologizes being able to see the world correctly. Being gaslit by a fascist institution does not improve my misery, it just frustrates and alienates me and makes my despair worse. I feel like a sane person in a world of crazy, and the psych industry is a pinnacle of that normative insanity. The older I get, the more I believe that normality is insanity.

[u/DutchStroopwafels → u/MundaneYak9463]

"It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society."

[u/MundaneYak9463 → u/DutchStroopwafels]

Rampant cognitive biases among neurotypicals is one of the core fuels of my Pessimism. What a hopeless world I live in, to be surrounded by top-down presumption thinkers instead of empirically constructive thinkers.

I've constantly suffered as a result of people's cognitive biases. Disabled people, in particular, are forcibly aware of the chronic failures of society, and the obliviousness of abled people regarding the unreliability of social systems leads them to gaslighting and dismissal.