Optimism Bias Quotes

People exaggerate their confidence in their plans - something we call the planning fallacy... The existence of the plan tends to induce overconfidence.

For people at the bottom who are really doing badly — those in the bottom 10th or 15th percentile — they think their work falls in the 60th or 55th percentile, so, above average. People at the bottom still think they're outperforming other people.

It is the habit of mankind to entrust to careless hope what they long for, and to use sovereign reason to thrust aside what they do not desire

There is a tendency to overestimate the positive things in our lives and underestimate the possibility of negative things

There are two things that have been true throughout history in big hunks. You can find differences in ten years, but in 50 year hunks, 100 years hunks, you'll find two things to be true. One, the world is always getting better. Two, people always think it's getting worse.

I think in life, you have a choice. You can either be optimistic or pessimistic, and I go for the optimism.

A plan is only a scenario, and almost by definition, it is optimistic... As a result, scenario planning can lead to a serious underestimate of the risk of failure.

The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion or ethnic background, is that we all believe we are above-average drivers.

It may well be our brains are wired up to be slightly more optimistic than they should be.

People exaggerate their own skills. they are optimistic about their prospects and overconfident about their guesses, including which managers to pick.

Cheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.

Your perception plays tricks when you are hoping for something.

The Optimism Bias: This is why our warnings on cigarette packages go unheeded. Yes smoking kills 6 million people per year. Smokers believe that it will kill the other guy.

One of the major biases in risky decision making is optimism. Optimism is a source of high-risk thinking.

Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.

People gravitate toward information that implies a happier outlook for them.

Except for some effects that I attribute mostly to age, my intuitive thinking is just as prone to overconfidence, extreme predictions, and the planning fallacy as it was before I made a study of these issues.

Such platitudes as "If you believe it, it will happen," "If you give 100%, you get 100%," "Good things happen to good people" people utter when we don't know what else to say. There's comfort in platitudes, and every so often they're accurate, but mainly they're hollow words. It's a sign of how little we're able to directly address the world around us. The language of the times reveals our avoidance.

People who have various kinds of politics for whom it is congenial for their apriority politics to say yes, things are getting much worse. They are opposed by people who also have a priori politics saying that this is the best of all possible worlds, capitalism is the greatest thing since sliced bread and you're just alarmists and so on and they can massage the data so it fits them.

But we all recognise the primary foible of frail humanity - our propensity for embracing hope and shunning logic, our tendency to believe what we desire rather than what we observe.

People react differently to hearing 'Procedure X has a 70 percent chance of survival' and 'Procedure Y has a 30 percent chance of death.' Phrased that way, people flock to Procedure X, even though the numbers are the same.

What ardently we wish, we soon believe.

I'm generally a very optimistic guy.

We over-exaggerate yesterday. We either think it was better or worse than it was - you know, the good old days. We over-estimate tomorrow; we think we can do more than we can - always. And that's why we put off everything till tomorrow.

The planning fallacy is that you make a plan, which is usually a best-case scenario. Then you assume that the outcome will follow your plan, even when you should know better.