Prescribed Optimism: Is It Right to Be Wrong About the Future?

Personal predictions are often optimistically biased. This simple observation has troubling implications for psychologists, econ-omists, and decision theorists concerned with rationality and the accuracy of self-knowledge (Armor & Taylor, 2002; Krizan & Windschitl, 2007; Sweeny, Carroll, & Shepperd, 2006). How-ever, normative conclusions about the impropriety of optimistic bias rest on an untested assumption: that people desire to be accurate when making personal predictions. If people believe, rightly or wrongly, that unrealistic optimism has some value, then optimistic bias may be usefully understood as being con-sistent with people’s values and beliefs. METHOD To investigate this issue, we examined people’s beliefs about the kinds of predictions (accurate, optimistic, or pessimistic) they and others ought to make. Specifically, we asked participants