Shweder, R. A. 17, 33–50. More interesting still would be to study unrealistic optimism among participants more economically deprived than those sampled in the current study. Study 4 thus aimed to create an experimental situation that was as controlled as those in Studies 2 and 3, but with the addition of a genuine cost to participants. They are often happy and joyful. Closely related to the distinction between independent and interdependent concepts of self is the description of cultures as individualistic or collectivist, and just as East Asian cultures have been categorized as collectivist, so too has India (Hoftsede, 1980; Triandis and Suh, 2002)2. It was considered important to sample from different socioeconomic groups not only in relation to the study’s particular interest in inequality but also because psychology in general has been guilty of oversampling from a very restricted age and educational pool with possible consequent problems for the generalizability of studies’ results (Henrich et al., 2010). Khilnani, S. (1997). It found that: (a) beliefs about risk likelihood, beliefs about risk severity, and worry about the risk all made independent contributions to interest in risk reduction; (b) unrealistic optimism undermined interest in risk reduction indirectly by decreasing worry; and (c) beliefs about risk likelihood and severity were not sufficient to explain the amount of worry expressed … 46, 961–978. Soc. East Asian cultures are paradigmatic examples of cultures with an interdependent rather than an independent construal of self, but they may also have related characteristics which play a part in their lack optimistic bias. Matheson, S. M., Asher, L., and Bateson, M. (2007). (2008) would produce pessimism for rare events and optimism for frequent events. For lower SES Indians (as was the case for two of the three other groups, and for the fourth group the trend was in the same direction) optimism for the good events was related to events being judged as more controllable, more highly valued and estimated as more frequent. Rev. Cultural variations in optimistic and pessimistic bias: do Easterners really expect the worst and Westerners really expect the best when predicting future life events? Such work as there is has focused on unrealistic pessimism about negative events, such as serious illness, and attempted to relate pessimism to low uptake of screening or lack of engagement with treatment (Lerman and Schwartz, 1993; Klein et al., 2010). J. Pers. It is also known as unrealistic optimism or comparative optimism. For any given item the average will be comprised of the difference scores of three groups of respondents: those who were optimistic, those who were neither optimistic nor pessimistic (and thus score zero), and those who were pessimistic. Since for this group optimism regarding having a heart attack correlated very highly with optimism on many other items such as not going bankrupt, and not having an accident while on public transport, it can be safely interpreted that the optimism relates to a general psychological orientation rather than reflecting the practice of actual health promoting behaviors. J. Psychol. Background: Overestimation of threat (OET) is ascribed a pathogenetic role in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). Chang, E. C., and Asakawa, K. (2003). This pattern was found for three of the four groups in the current study. Berry, J. W. (1989). Adolesc. What are the names of Santa's 12 reindeers? Kapadia, S., and Miller, J. In the same study cultural differences did emerge when the participants made indirect judgments and under these conditions Japanese respondents showed considerably less optimism than USA respondents. Lichtenstein, S., Slovic, P., Fischoff, B., Layman, M., and Combs, B. Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., and Norenzayan, A. Indeed Sinha and Tripathi (1994) note that even though India does not occupy a very low place on the Individualism-Collectivism scale, the categorization of India as collectivist has “somehow gotten stuck to the Indian culture” (p. 124). In versions 1 and 3, the instruction on the questionnaire read “The chances of an event occurring in your life may be the same or different from the chances of the event occurring in the lives of people like you. An interesting aspect of the data is the contrasting profiles of the higher and lower SES Indian groups. Judd, C. M., Westfall, J., and Kenny, D. A. Sci. PLoS ONE 4:e7185. How do you reset the maintenance required light on a 2007 Toyota Avalon? Also, by not taking account of the extent of optimism and pessimism, the ratio scores are not subject to the averaging problem where, as in the case of the lower SES Indian group’s good event scores, an average difference score of −2.6% came about through a slightly smaller group of respondents being very pessimistic outweighing a slightly larger group of participants being mildly optimistic. Markus, H. R., and Kitayama, S. (1991). Tables 2– 5 also display responses for each item in terms of the ratio of optimistic to pessimistic responses (optimism indicated by a score above 1.0, and pessimism indicated by a score below 1.0). Whereas optimism refers to a … The operation of this egocentric bias is held to lead to unrealistic optimism for infrequent negative events and unrealistic pessimism for frequent negative events. Within nationalities, the ranking of good event items for controllability did not vary by SES, but the rankings between nationalities were not similar [rho(9) = 0.39, p = 0.233]. An investigation of two competing explanations. New Delhi: Business Standard (accesses September 05, 2009). The high rate of unrealistic optimism shown by the Indian participants in the current study makes it clear that it is possible to demonstrate self-enhancement and yet be from a collectivist Asian culture. “Does the concept of the person vary cross-culturally?” in Cultural Conceptions of Mental Health and Therapy, eds A. J. Marsella and G. M. White (New York: Kluver), 158–199. B. Ingoldsby (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications), 209–230. In summary, to date research does suggest that the tendency to self-enhance and show unrealistic optimism is very robust among Westerners, and not subject to methodological nuance. Sinha, J. Articles. In the case of both speakers, Marathi was their mother tongue. Cross Cult. Psychol. Participants typically reported that they had no education beyond senior school leaving age (12th standard) and were employed in clerical occupations in government or private sector organizations. A society will “feel” very unequal when, for example as in India, a substantial proportion of the population live below the international poverty line alongside other members of the same society living in extreme affluence. Further research is needed to examine the relationship between optimism and event frequency, by varying events by their absolute frequency as well as by their frequency relative to each other. Emerging epidemic of cardiovascular disease in developing countries. Few if any studies have compared rates of unrealistic optimism and self-enhancement for different socioeconomic groups within a culture. Psychol. Factor analysis was used to explore the relationship between event frequency (for “similar others”), event controllability and event desirability as initial multiple regressions looking at the relationship of these three variables to optimism/pessimism for bad and good events separately, revealed high levels of multicollinearity between the three independent variables (indicated by pair-wise correlations above 0.80 and VIF values >5). (1982). |, http://geert-hofstede.com/dimensions.html, United Nations Development Programme, 2010, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/guide-method/census/2011/index.html, Department of Psychology, Social Work and Public Health, Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, UK. But it also suggests that the illusion of control is as an influential factor in the mindset of Indians as it has been held to be in the Western mindset, and accords with Shweder’s (2008) observation that, contrary to what is often believed by Westerners, Hindus do have a strong sense of agency8 Psychol. Loughnan et al. A universalist approach is also taken by those who emphasize the role of cognitive biases in social comparative judgments (Windschitl et al., 2008). Recently, heart disease has also been established as the foremost cause of death in India (Jha and Laxminarayan, 2009). They are particularly concerned with the risk perception of rare negative events, and suggest that the few respondents who for some reason have a rational reason to be pessimistic regarding the risk in question (for example through a known genetic predisposition to a rare disease) do not get a chance to register the full extent of their pessimism as the design of response scales does not enable their responses to balance the more moderate optimism of the majority who have a reason to be optimistic (for example by knowing they are not in an at risk group for the disease in question). The Inner World: A Psycho-analytic Study of Childhood and Society in India. Mascalo, M., and Bhatia, S. (2002). Res. And kind of a bummer to be around. Of both theoretical and applied relevance, unrealistic optimism has been dubbed “the most significant of the cognitive biases” (Kahneman, 2011). Impact Factor 2.067 | CiteScore 3.2More on impact ›, Contextual shaping of health and well-being: Contributions from cultural-clinical psychology Nevertheless, there are “profound cultural differences in the ways people come to understand themselves” (Heine, 2012, p. 195), and categorizations such as interdependence/independence and collectivism/individualism have been and will continue to stimulate the formation of hypotheses about culture and behavior. Indian J. Med. Office for National Statistics. Brahmanical idealism, anarchic individualism, and the dynamics of Indian negotiating behaviour. (2011) suggest that self-enhancement relates to factors that result from socioeconomic differences, such as the drive to compete for social superiority thought by Wilkinson and Pickett (2010) to be characteristic of living in a socially and economically unequal society. In addition to addressing theoretical issues concerning culture and unrealistic optimism, the results of the study may have some bearing on applied health issues. In terms of absolute amount of controllability (where 1 signified “impossible to control” and 4 signified “certainly possible to make this happen/prevent this happening”), good events were rated 2.44 (SD = 0.35, N = 84) and this did not vary by nationality or by SES as simple main effects or in interaction. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0007185. Perceived control and the optimistic bias: a meta-analytic review. Shurmer-Smith, P. (2000). J. Abnorm. Ther. Finally, based on the results of a factor analysis of event frequency, controllability and desirability, their possible confounding role was investigated using a series of multiple regressions to assess the relationship of these factors to comparative optimism for bad and good events for each of the four participant groups. With this alteration of focus, Chang and Asakawa (2003) now found European Americans displaying an optimistic bias regarding both positive and negative events, and the Japanese showing no bias in either direction for positive events and a pessimistic bias for negative events. Broadly this indicates a greater degree of optimism and self-enhancement among Indian than English participants. Pessimists, on the other hand, may … The cultural psychology of suffering: the many meanings of health in Orissa, India (and elsewhere). Nevertheless it was notable that three of the 10 new items suggested in India involved money, which brought the number of explicitly financial items to a total of six items, four of which were located in the good event list. (2011). The phenomenon is also often referred to as "the illusion of invulnerability," "unrealistic optimism," and a "personal fable." Triandis, H. C., and Suh, E. M. (2002). Those who underestimate the risk, take less action. For good events however, gradations in relative optimism/pessimism related to item controllability/desirability/frequency for three of the four groups studied. Cultural Psychology. 43, 1191–1204. Cultural variation in unrealistic optimism: does the West feel more invulnerable than the East? J. Psychol. As can be seen in Table 6, multiple regressions indicated that this factor was significantly related to optimism/pessimism in three of the four groups. Individual and relational conceptions of self in India and the United States. View all Coronary Heart Disease Statistics in England, 2012. Srinivas, M. N. (1962). SELF-ENHANCEMENT,UNREALISTICOPTIMISM,ANDCULTURE The majority of the early research on unrealistic optimism in the 1980s and 1990s was conducted on participants in the USA (q.v. Langer, E. (1975). The extent of the optimism bias is thus measured empirically by recording an individual's expectations before an event unfolds and contrasting those with the outcomes that transpire. Human Development Report. If the illusion of control is heavily involved in unrealistic optimism, one would expect to find less unrealistic optimism among respondents whose culture places less value on control. Dohrenwend, B. P., Levav, I., Shrout, P. E., Schwartz, S., Naveh, G., Link, B. G., et al. (2010). Averaging across events, higher and lower SES English participants showed neither optimism nor pessimism for good events. The Discovery of India. Optimism/pessimism scores for good events did not vary by gender or by task order/questionnaire version. Taken as a whole the results show that, for three of the four groups studied, neither event controllability/desirability nor frequency played a part in the determination of relative optimism for bad events. Optimism bias is a cognitive bias that causes someone to believe that they themselves are less likely to experience a negative event. Psychol. Keep a gratitude diary. Adherence and psychological adjustment among women at high risk for breast cancer. Further, two of the classic studies which illustrate the contrasting attributional styles of those who have independent and interdependent concepts of self drew their non-Western samples from India (Shweder and Bourne, 1982; Miller, 1984). In his studies of unrealistic optimism, Weinstein (1989, 1984, Weinstein and Kliein, 1996) has proved evidence of the harmful effects of optimistic biases in risk perception related to a host of health hazards. To be pessimistic means you believe evil outweighs the good and that bad things are more likely to happen. At first, the bulk of research was conducted using populations in North America and Northern Europe, the optimistic bias was thought of as universal, and little attention was paid to cultural context. 22, 1254–1258. (2001). Much of the research on comparative optimism has investigated respondents’ expectations about their likelihood of experiencing negative life events. Although not optimistic on every item, the higher SES Indian group on average continued to show comparative optimism expecting to be more likely to experience these events than other people like themselves. Mascalo, M., Misra, G., and Rapisardi, C. (2004). Unrealistic optimism in early-phase oncology trials. Klein, W., Lipkus, I. M., Scholl, S., McQueen, A., Cerully, J., and Harris, P. R. (2010). B. P., and Kanungo, R. N. (1997). Depression, generalized anxiety disorder, and certainty in pessimistic predictions about the future. But in contrast, the lower SES Indian group on average showed pessimism regarding their chances of experiencing good events which came about through being outright pessimistic on some items and neither optimistic or pessimistic on the remaining items. 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