Christopher McLeod
University of Florida, FL·Psychology
People tend to overestimate their chances of good outcomes and underestimate their chances of bad ones. This tendency is called unrealistic optimism.
- Fields
Psychology
Social Science
- Topics
unrealistic optimism
optimism bias
decision making
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2028
What they work on
- Measure unrealistic optimism by comparing minor league baseball players' and high school juniors' expectations with data-based predictions of reaching Major League Baseball or top universities.
- Test with Bayesian model comparison whether unrealistic optimism helps or hurts focal outcomes, such as reaching the major leagues or getting into a top college.
- Examine how unrealistic optimism influences pursuit of alternative options and broader tertiary outcomes, following participants for 2–3 years.
- Measure explanatory variables to identify why unrealistic optimism has helpful or harmful consequences, building a framework that reconciles conflicting findings.
More about the research
It shapes decisions in health, education and work, yet researchers disagree about whether it helps or hurts. It might lead to poor choices and keep people from trying other options. Or it might help them cope and stay motivated through hard tasks.
Why it matters
Knowing when overconfidence about one's chances helps or harms could give educators, managers and coaches practical guidance on supporting people's decisions. Examples include students choosing colleges and athletes pursuing professional careers. The study could help people pursue ambitious goals while keeping sensible backup options.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Anna Konova
Rutgers University-New Brunswick, NJ·Neuroscience
Test whether experimentally induced craving shifts the brain's drug-specific value signals in 89 patients with opioid use disorder, using a value-based choice task during fMRI with craving and control sessions.
Veljko Dubljevic
North Carolina State University, NC·Social Science·Early-career
Develop new moral scenarios about potentially harmful traffic decisions involving vehicles and pedestrians, and render them as animations in an immersive virtual reality setting for controlled testing of moral judgment.
Steven Sloman
Brown University, RI·Psychology
Test whether small groups of partisans with opposing views generate better solutions to politicized problems during a conjecture phase than ideologically mixed groups that deliberate or groups that simply combine members' judgments.
The school
University of Florida: 65 labs on PI Pages, $1.3B a year on research, 795 research doctorates a year.
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