Optimism and its relation to attention and social identification

Most people are characterized by overly optimistic expectancies for their own future. Additionally, people are prone to various other cognitive biases (e.g., in attention) and show social optimism biases for individuals or groups (i.e., in-groups) that they identify with. Commonalities across these phenomena are largely unknown and therefore addressed in the current presentation.

Specifically, the neurobiological nature and causality of mutual influences between positive biases in expectancies (i.e., optimism bias) and attention will be addressed. The presentation will further cover the neurocognitive overlap of personal and social forms of optimism bias and compare expectancies for different social out-groups. Finally, possibilities to modify social optimism bias will be outlined.