Image credit: George Pagan III (CC0)
Anticipating the future is an essential part of human thinking and helps us guide how we understand the world. We continuously update this information to make better predictions and generalizations.
When faced with new information, we tend to downplay bad news and emphasize good news. This bias towards optimism supports mental health and helps people stay motivated and resilient when facing difficulties.
However, in hard times, and/or when people feel threatened or depressed, they may lose their ability to focus on good news. Instead, they may begin to emphasize possible negative outcomes. For example, the COVID-19 pandemic created a long-lasting period of challenges for many people. Every-day activities, like going to work or food shopping, became risky. Uncertainty about the economy and health impacts further weighed on people’s minds.
Khalid et al. set out to understand if extreme and long-lasting challenges affect the optimism bias in belief updating. The experiments compared how 93 adults estimated their chances of adverse experiences like a job loss or illness during the pandemic in France, with the estimations of 60 individuals before or after the pandemic. More specifically, 30 people were recruited in France in October 2019 before the pandemic, and a further 34 and 31, respectively, were recruited in March to April 2020 and May 2021, and in addition 28 people from the pre-pandemic group were consulted again in March to April 2020. Another 30 people were recruited after the pandemic in June 2022.
The experiments measured how much people’s predictions changed after learning real statistics about the likelihood of adverse future life events. Before and after the pandemic, people showed a strong optimistic bias when considering these statistics. They gave more weight to good news than to bad news. But this bias disappeared during the pandemic, and people weighed positive and negative information more evenly.
The experiments also showed that before and after the pandemic, people updated their beliefs in a way that resembled trial-and-error learning. In contrast, during the pandemic, their updates were more cautious and evidence-based, like weighing all the facts before making a judgment.
Khalid et al. shed light on how a large-scale crisis can affect our perception of the future. In the long term, this could help mental health professionals better understand how people cope with uncertainty and guide efforts to strengthen resilience in difficult times. More research is needed to explore how changes in belief updating relate to mental health and what it means to adopt a healthy level of optimism to recover after significant life challenges.
