Do People Prescribe Optimism, Overoptimism, or Neither?
通过三项实验（663名美国大学生），发现人们倾向于建议对不确定的未来事件保持乐观，但反对高估事件发生的可能性，即不赞成过度乐观。
Past work has suggested that people prescribe optimism—believing it is better to be optimistic, instead of accurate or pessimistic, about uncertain future events. Here, we identified and addressed an important ambiguity about whether those findings reflect an endorsement of biased beliefs—that is, whether people prescribe likelihood estimates that reflect overoptimism. In three studies, participants ( N = 663 U.S. university students) read scenarios about protagonists facing uncertain events with a desired outcome. Results replicated prescriptions of optimism when we used the same solicitations as in past work. However, we found quite different prescriptions when using alternative solicitations that asked about potential bias in likelihood estimations and that did not involve vague terms such as “optimistic.” Participants generally prescribed being optimistic, feeling optimistic, and even thinking optimistically about the events, but they did not prescribe overestimating the likelihood of those events.