Optimistic Bias: What You Think, What You Know, Or Whom You Know?(Report‪)‬

A few weeks after graduating from college, I (Chapin) moved everything I owned to the beach in a used pick-up truck. My minimum-wage job afforded me a one bedroom apartment filled with used furniture and an air mattress. Barely scraping by financially, air conditioning was not an option; every morning when I left for work, I had a decision to make: Leave the windows open risking a break-in or come home to a sweltering inferno? Each time I returned home to find my belongings intact, I was a little more confident that everything would be OK. One day it happened ... I returned to an empty apartment. Not content to just take my things, the burglars flipped through photo albums (removing one photo of me), tried on my clothes, and fried up sausages I had thawing for dinner, leaving only the dirty dishes behind. The feeling of security was gone; I broke the lease and found a new apartment. This was my informal personal introduction to optimistic bias. Simply stated, optimistic bias (Weinstein, 1980) is the perception that "bad things happen to other people, not to me." Recent studies illustrate that optimistic bias can appear anywhere: Adults in the U.K. believe they are less prone to health risks from their cell phones (White, Eiser, Harris & Pahl, 2007), U.S. adults believe they are better able than most to control their diabetes (Walker, Caban, Schecter, Basch, Blanco, DeWitt, Kalten, Mera, & Mojica, 2007), and Swedish teens skip the sunscreen because they don't believe they can get skin cancer (Branstrom, Kristjansson & Ullen, 2005).