The Effect Of Self-threat On Optimistic Bias

People generally have an optimistic attitude towards the future,thinking that positive events are more likely to happen to themselves and negative events are more likely to happen to others.This phenomenon is called optimistic bias.Optimistic bias can make people hold more positive beliefs about the future,which is of great significance to the survival and evolution of individuals.In people’s daily life,they often must face various unpredictable challenges,which may change people’s original optimistic attitude towards the future.Previous studies have shown that after experiencing self-threat,people’s evaluation of themselves will become more positive,showing less self-deprecation and pessimistic bias about the future.However,there are few previous studies that directly explore how self-threat affects optimism bias,and most of them use the questioned social comparison task when measuring optimism bias.Therefore,in order to further explore the influence of self-threat on optimism bias,this paper uses a more stable information update task to measure optimism bias.In addition,self-affirmation theory holds that self-affirmation is one of the methods to alleviate self-threat.In order to alleviate or weaken the influence of self-threat to a certain extent,this study also introduces self-affirmation to explore its influence on the level of optimism bias of individuals after experiencing self-threat.Experiment 1a adopted a two-factor mixed experimental design,using the level induction task to indirectly manipulate the individual’s self-threat level.We entered update as the dependent variable and as independent variables the valence of the information in the information update task(good news vs bad news)and social status(high status vs middle status vs low status).Firstly,the independent variables were manipulated by the rank-inducting task,and then the dependent variables were measured by the information update task.The results show that individuals who receive different status feedback have different levels of optimistic bias.Compared with individuals who get higher status feedback,individuals who get lower status show greater optimistic bias.In experiment 1b,the rank-inducting task in experiment 1a was changed into classical self-threat task,and the independent variables were self-threat and valence of the information,in which self-threat was an inter-subject variable and message type was an intra-subject variable.The results show that compared with individuals who have not experienced self-threat,individuals who have experienced self-threat have higher optimistic bias level.In experiment 2,self-affirmation manipulation was added on the basis of experiment1 b,and a three-factor mixed design was adopted.The independent variables were self-threat,self-affirmation and valence of the information,in which self-threat and selfaffirmation were inter-subject variables,and message type was intra-subject variables.First,the subjects were randomly assigned to the threat group to receive self-threat feedback or the control group not to receive self-threat feedback by the computer.Then the subjects were randomly assigned to experience self-affirmation manipulation or non-selfaffirmation manipulation.Finally,the subjects need to complete the information update task to measure their optimistic bias level.The results showed that experiment 2 repeated the results of the first two experiments,and found that compared with the control group,the level of optimism bias of individuals after experiencing self-threat was higher,but no effect of self-affirmation on optimism bias was observed.