Optimism in the case of nothing: Asymmetric belief updating observed in valence-neutral life events

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2021.104939

Commentary

How people update their beliefs when confronted with new information is an integral part of everyday life.

However, a substantial body of literature suggests that people's belief updating is optimistically biased and that beliefs are updated in response to good news rather than bad news.

However, recent research has shown that findings that were interpreted as evidence for optimistic belief updating may be the result of flaws in experimental design rather than motivated reasoning.

In this study, we run three preregistered variants of the standard belief updating paradigm (N = 300 combinations) to prove to this contention.

In this paradigm, we test asymmetric belief updating using neutrals.

We find evidence of biased beliefs that appear to be updated with neutral stimuli, and we also show that there is uninterpretable variability across samples and analytic methods. These results help highlight methodological flaws in current optimistic belief updating research, according to the authors.