We Love Your Optimism, But Is It Whistling Past the Graveyard?

Half-full? Half-empty? Evidence suggests how we perceive the glass doesn’t matter as much as what we choose to fill it with.

We have a remarkable ability to imagine possible futures. We’ve spent a lot of time practicing it, after all. We use it every day to help us make all kinds of preparations for the future, from what to have for dinner to saving for retirement.

It’s also exceptionally entertaining. How many times have you dreamed of palm trees, white sand, and crystal-clear water? We’ve spent countless hours using our infinite imaginations to fantasize about our ultimate futures.

The process by which we orient ourselves toward the future is a mental practice known to psychologists as “prospection.” It is an anticipatory reflection on imminent or possible events and includes planning, prediction, hypothetical scenarios, and evaluations of the future.

Prospecting is a skill of animals too. You see it every time you’re greeted with a wagging tail when you approach your dog with a leash. We know chimpanzees, orangutans, and ravens prospect because they know how to save objects for future use.

Those given this power of foresight benefit from improved decision-making, goal attainment, even a greater sense of well-being. Using our imagination to fantasize about the future gives us optimism. However, those of us who rely on fantasy as our greatest source of optimism might whistle past the graveyard.

Three Parts Expectation, One Part Fantasy

You don’t have to look very hard to find proof of the health benefits of positive thinking. Yet little attention is given to the dangers of too much.

Can too much positive thinking blur the line between real expectation and fantasy? If so, what effects would it have on prospecting the achievement of goals?

Two scholars from the University of Pennsylvania wondered if the impact of positive thinking was always positive. To find out, they designed a weight loss program and studied a pool of twenty-five women to understand how prospecting the success of losing weight played a role in their achieved outcomes.

To elicit the difference between prospecting based on expectation and prospecting based on fantasy, they asked participants a series of point-rated questions to measure confidence on a scale of one to seven. Some asked how the women about their realistic expectations of success. For example:

“How confident are you that after this program is completed, you will have lost the amount of weight you indicated in question 1?”

Other questions were open-ended, designed to inspire fantasies about weight loss and how they imagine future encounters with tempting foods. Each of the participants penned endings to hypothetical scenarios. For example:

“You have just completed Penn’s weight loss program. Tonight you have made plans to go out with an old friend whom you haven’t seen in about a year. As you wait for your friend to arrive, you imagine…”

They found that the more positively a subject prospected her expectation of success, the more weight she lost. However, the more positive her fantasy was about losing weight, the less weight she lost. In other words, those who held unrealistically optimistic views of their future self (i.e., were fantasizing) were less successful than those with realistic expectations.

Even pessimists with low expectations of success but optimistic fantasies were less successful at losing weight than pessimists with pessimistic fantasies. The success of optimists with high expectations of success, on the other hand, wasn’t affected by their fantasies either way.

That means success has less to do with viewing the glass half-empty or half-full than it does with the portions of expectation and fantasy that fill it.

Skill and Luck Aren’t the Same, But We Treat Them Like They Are

When we maintain unrealistically positive views of ourselves, we end up overestimating our ability to control outcomes, even in cases of luck or chance. Such is the work of Harvard Professor of Psychology Ellen Langer.

Langer’s study ventured to discover why people pretend to acknowledge the difference between the roles of skill and luck in success but behave as if events of chance are controllable. Are we that contradictory?

Skill requires behavior to produce an outcome. Since behavior is controllable, so too would its outcome.

Luck is a matter of chance. We can’t control chance. Therefore, being lucky is uncontrollable.

Despite this clear distinction, Langer argues the reason people don’t acknowledge it is that so many of us believe in a “just world.”

The “just-world” theory is a philosophy of life better known by its portending bumper sticker, “Karma spares no one.” Like mainstream ideas about karma, belief in a just world is the belief that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. It is the belief that people get what they deserve.

As many of us do, believing people get what they deserve means believing our behavior influences our fate. That makes luck, if a part of fate, appears controllable. But we already pointed out it’s not. Belief in a just world, or karma, gives us the illusion of control.

Our need for control is so great that we’re willing to ignore the fact that sometimes it’s an illusion.

Langer introduced her participants to situations involving chance and measured their levels of confidence in success along the way. One study offered subjects lottery tickets. Some were allowed to choose their ticket; others were not. Another study gave participants a choice or no choice of a familiar or unfamiliar lottery ticket.

The results of these and others included in the observation showed that people are motivated to control their environment. Whether out of a need to exhibit competence, an instinct to master, or aspiring for superiority, “most social scientists agree that there is a motivation to master one’s environment, and a complete mastery would include the ability to ‘beat the odds,’” even in situations of chance.

This motivation for control lends to another explanation for denying the distinction between the outcomes of skill and chance. Believing we lack control can develop perceptions of helplessness and fears of its negative consequences. People don’t want to believe they’re helpless.

Fantastically Moderate

The benefits of optimism are undeniable. A simple search on the power of positive thinking will yield enough evidence to convince you of a lifetime.

Also, many of the same benefits gained from positive thinking (e.g., feeling good, excited, etc.) are still attainable when positive thinking becomes fantasy, even when we use optimism to lie to ourselves.

So what’s the harm?

The goal of feeling good is markedly different from the goal of success. Langer is out to prove the power of positive thinking can deceive us into believing we’ll be more successful than reality indicates; that when prospecting, it’s better to reach for optimism rooted in realistic expectation instead of willful fantasy.

Letting optimism take the wheel because we believe in a just world is whistling past the graveyard. It shouldn’t be any surprise that fantasizing about losing weight does nothing for our ability to lose it. Being optimistic about your lottery ticket is fine, but it wouldn’t do much for burning calories if doesn’t help get you moving.

When we put more faith into our optimism than our own ability, the glass is half-full of fantasy. Dump the glass and prospect realistically. Studies have shown your success depends on it.