Optimism Bias In Situations And Its Influentail Factors

Optimism bias is the tendency for individuals to believe that his or her chances of experiencing a positive event are higher or a negative event are lower than that of one's peers. The research classifies optimism bias into two types, according to its form of expression. That is type I of optimism bias toward oneself——to themselves, people are more likely to overestimate the probability of positive events, and type II of optimism bias toward others——to others, people are more likely to overestimate the probability of negative events. The optimism bias is a general phenomenon to people in many cases, it has both positive and negative effects.Optimism bias can help people to maintain their mental health by keeping high self-esteem and decreasing anxiety, to attain better performances and successes by stimulating and sustaining higher achievement motivation. And by underestimating probability of negative events, optimism bias will result in people's more dangerous actions, less precautions against adverse. Therefore, we should utilize positive effects of optimistic bias to make people have optimistic views of world and feel happy and weaken the negative effects on people.By reviewing the research documentary of domestic and foreign studies on optimism bias, we found that there are only few empirical studies in China. While researchers abroad usually used self-report scale to investigate explicit individual's optimistic bias on different events. Therefore, other methods such as implicit measure should be used in research to explore implicit optimistic bias and complement single method. Secondly, most researches are correlation research and the result cannot make causal inference. Moreover, event features were not be control strictly in some researches. Therefore, they might interact with other factors and influence optimistic bias jointly. Thirdly, there were few researches to explore how organization allegiance influences optimistic bias of members in temporary organization. From the above, our research firstly investigates the undergraduates'state of optimism bias. After that by utilizing IAT and GNAT, the research explores the implicit features of optimism bias. At last, using experimental method, the research examines the factors which can affect optimism bias in area of health and organization. Specifically, this research is composed of four studies.In the first study, the research investigates the optimism bias of undergraduates using method of questionnaire survey. The second study is the focus among these our studies. IAT and GNAT is used to examine the implicit features of optimism bias, that is whether optimism bias has automatic and unconscious characters or not. In third study, the research investigates explores how controllability and seriousness of events affect optimism bias in area of health. The forth study explores how organizational identity and different methods affect optimism bias in organization. The main conclusions are as follows:Firstly, optimism bias on life events is widespread among undergraduates, and it has two types. The first one is type I of optimism bias toward oneself——people believe that positive events are more likely to happen to them, and type II of optimism bias toward others——people believe that negative events are more likely to happen to others. Optmisitic bias has no significant difference between male and female. Dispositional optimism has influence on optimism bias. Optimists have higher optimism bias than pessimists on both positive and negative events.Secondly, it manifests that optimism bias has automatic and unconscious feature in program of IAT and GNAT.Thirdly, in health condition, controllability and seriousness affect optimism bias significantly. Specifically, participants who think the events are of his control and less serious show more optimism bias.Fourthly, in organization scenario, organization identity can lead to higher optimism bias of members. However, there is no difference between direct approach and indirect method of measuring optimism bias. There are several new ideas brought forth by this paper:a) On the basis of abroad research, the research investigates undergraduates' optimism bias and explores mental mechanism of optimism bias, which supplies the empirical study interiorly.b)The most important is that the research uses implicit program to examine implicit effect of optimism bias, and the result manifested that optimism bias has automatic and unconscious character. Moreover, the implicit method is a supplement to previous methods of optimism bias.c) The present research uses experiment to investigate how event features affect optimistic bias and it can supplement and verify previous results from correlation researches..d) The research explores whether organization identity affects organizational members'judgment about their organization victory or defeat in competition. The result can provide some suggestion in practice.Finally, this study's future directions are discussed. Future research should further expand in the following areas:a) Because of complexities of individuals, there are few researches on exploring the individual's optimism bias on individual level. We should pay more attention to this issue though it is difficult.b) Some results suggested that people show pessimism bias in several events, and researchers proposed that optimism bias and pessimism bias maybe a continuum of ends. Therefore we should combine optimism bias with pessimism bias into one study.c) Future research should explore optimism bias in other forms of organization situation besides classes.d) Neural mechanism of psychological phenomena is a hotspot, so we should examine the neural mechanism of optimism bias in future.