28 luglio 2007
Optimists and pessimists: who gets the better deal?
Per festeggiare la visita alla casettina nuova, compiuta la scorsa domenica mattina, mi sono concesso un giretto in libreria. Ne sono uscito con due cosine leggere leggere. Una, in particolare, non è neppur degna di essere chiamata “lettura leggera”. Preferisco chiamarla “simpatico passatempo”. Comunque sia, si tratta di un libricino che raccoglie alcuni giochi da fare con le carte. Il titolo è eloquente: “Card Tricks“, la casa editrice è la Shenanigans, famosissima per questo genere di libricini di intrattenimento. Il particolare che mi ha attirato è che, con il libro in questione, era allegato un mazzo di carte da poker segnate. Non ne avevo mai visto uno in vita mia e devo ammettere che il sistema utilizzato è ingegnoso. Seppur visibilissimo anche ad un occhio solo minimamente attento.
Il secondo acquisto, invece, arriva direttamente dalla sezione “Popular Psychology”. Che più “popular” di così non si potrebbe: “The Mind Gym: Wake Your Mind Up“. Uno di quei classici libri che raccontano banalità, ma che si propongono di cambiarti la vita. In genere si tratta di una tipologia di libri che odio. Questa volta, invece, ci sono cascato. E la colpa è di un capitolo riguardante le tecniche per superare il vizio della procrastinazione, uno dei miei problemi più ricorrenti.
In realtà, sulla procrastinazione si spendono poche parole. Ma nel libro ho trovato alcune cose carine comunque. Come ad esempio la breve riflessione su ottimismo/pessimismo/realismo che propongo qui di seguito.
Optimist live longer
In the Mayo Clinic in the US, researchers selected almost 900 people who referred themselves for medical care. When they were originally admitted to the clinic, they took a series of examinations and as part of the series were tested for their level of optimism. Thirty years later, 200 of the original 900 had died, with the optimists living 19% longer than the pessimists.
But the sceptic would respond, there may have been lots of other variables that had come into play: diet, work pressure, a sexually transmitted disease and so on. So where could you do a study where all these remain the same for the whole population? Answer: a convent.
A group of psychologists analyzed an autobiographical story which nuns wrote as they were completing their final vows before entering a convent in 1900. The scientists discovered that 90% of the most positive quarter were still alive at 84. In contrast only 34% of the least positive quarter were still alive.
Furthermore 54% of the most positive quarter were still alive at 94. And after studying many other factors, level of optimism was the only one that had a significant correlation with lifespan.
Optimists achieve more
And not just because they live for longer. Optimists tend to be more persistent and resilient and so get more (or better) results.
In a large-scale experiment conducted by the pioneering psychologist Martin Seligman, a group of optimists and pessimists were recruited to become insurance sales agents with the intention of comparing their performance. By the second year of the experiment the optimists were outselling the pessimists by 57%.
Identifying the comparative levels of optimism between competing candidates in the 1988 Senate elections in the US, and backing the greater optimist, produced a more accurate prediction of the final outcome than any of the opinion polls.
Pessimists are more likely to be right
It’s not that everything in life goes an optimist’s wat. Far from it. For all their good fortune, you might be surprised how much optimists tend to get things wrong.
In the study with the insurance sales people, the pessimists were far more accurate about the conversion rate, ie, the number of calls required to make a sale. The optimists generally got it wrong, usually thinking it was many times better than it actually was. The result? The pessimists gave up making calls earlier than the optimists, who ploughed on and got the extra sales. But the pessimists were right.
And realists?
In the same way that a tourist might call himself a ‘traveller’, some pessimists prefer to go under the label ‘realist’. And that is a fair assessment: they are more realistic than the optimist in their analysis of the situation.
Not only can the realist school of pessimism bask in the fact that it is more ‘right’ than the optimist, it can go further by offering a justification for this mode of thinking. By being realistic about the world, the realists argue, they are never going to find themselves disappointed or let down by the events.
However, the irony is that even with this play-safe behaviour, the realist is still more likely to be disappointed than the optimist. This is because when something apparently bad does happen, the optimist will tend to focus on the upside. Say, for example, an optimist and a realist get turned down for a bank loan. The realist/pessimist says, ‘I suspected as much’ and congratulates himself on not having built up false hopes. The optimist, however, thinks, ‘I now know what I need to do to increase my chances of being approved next time’ and goes back for a second attempt. No prizes for guessing who has the greater chance of actually getting the loan.
Comments(2)
Sarebbe interessante se tutti potessero capire . . sarebbe vera condivisione se lo traducessi per coloro i quali non conoscono l’inglese.
Ciao
Purtroppo, enormità di tempo richiesto a parte (che al momento non mi posso permettere), non sono un granchè bravo nelle traduzioni. Ergo, credo si perderebbe il 90% del senso del messaggio originario. Una scusa in più per i lettori per impratichirsi con l’inglese…