Tali Sharot: The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain. New York, Pantheon, 2011. 272 pages.
People always seem to expect the best, despite the odds. As Tali Sharot discusses in THE OPTIMISM BIAS, most people have unrealistically positive expectations of their future. She does a great job of summing up much of the current neuroscientific research–including her own work–on the subject of optimism, and has a life-affirming conclusion: even though we might be irrationally positive, for the most part that’s a good thing, as optimists tend to face adversity better than pessimists.
While there is a great deal of good material in the book, there is also a lot of what feels like padding. In the first chapter, there’s several pages of “intro to perception” material–including a “thatcherized” photo of a young girl that had me desperately wishing for some brain bleach–that feels like could have been summed up much more quickly.
In general, the feeling I got was that there was enough here for a great article or two, but not quite enough to justify its inflation to book length.
In addition, some of the references to current events don’t seem particularly apt. Early on, Sharot enthuses that some believe optimism might be a curiously American invention, “a by-product of Barack Obama’s imagination.” Huh? Before 2008 no one in America was optimistic? She hinges an entire chapter on “when private optimism meets public despair” on just how incredibly awesome the president is; his election apparently set an unprecedented wave of optimism sweeping over the nation despite dire economic circumstances. It gets scary when she compares listening to an Obama speech to holding a baby, patting a dog, or having sex, telling us that hearing him speak triggers a feeling called “elevation” that erases cynicism and generates hope. And the Coca Cola Corporation would like to teach the world to sing, I’m sure. Sharot doesn’t mention “I’m going to lead you to a better future, just trust me” is a theme presidents from Reagan to FDR have sounded before; its something every politician who wants to get elected is going to tell you, no matter where they stand on the political spectrum. It seems willfully naive to believe that any politician, no matter how well-packaged, is that much different from the thousands of others who have come before. Also, her use of Lance Armstrong as a case study in the power of optimism seems a bit off, in light of the doping allegations that continue to surround him. For someone who has a psychology background, Sharot seems to take an awful lot at face value.
There are some really interesting implications of Sharot’s thesis–that the human brain is conditioned to take an irrationally rosy view of the future–for the study of gambling. Mercantile or commercial casino games are, almost without exception, negative expectation games where the player is sure, over time, to lose to the house. Yet they have not lost their appeal. Could this be because most people assume that, like getting cancer or losing one’s job, sevening out is something that will happen to other people, but not to them? Intuitively, that seems like a reasonable assumption. I’d really like to see neuroscientists like Sharot look more deeply into how gambling fits in to the optimism equation.
In short, THE OPTIMISM BIAS has some genuinely thought-provoking material and offers a nice window into the author’s interesting work, but disappoints as a book. Still, I’m hopeful that future work from Sharot will be a little more on-point and help the general public better understand her work into the mechanisms of hope.