Optimistic Reinterpretation

Optimistic Reinterpretation

Although people do not appear to be indiscriminately optimistic, and although stating optimistic expectations may help facilitate the attainment of desired outcomes, optimistic predictions will sometimes be disconfirmed. It may still be possible, however, for the disappointment associated with unmet expectations to be avoided if the evaluation of outcomes is biased in a manner that minimizes any discrepancies between what had been expected and what was ultimately attained. Evidence consistent with this notion reveals that, following failure, people may bias both their perceptions of what was achieved and their recall of what they had initially expected.

Reinterpreting Outcomes. A series of studies conducted by Klaaren, Hodges, and Wilson (1994) provides what may be the most direct evidence that people with positive expectations put a favorable spin on outcomes they receive, even when these outcomes might reasonably be considered to be disappointing. In these studies, people who had expected a positive experience but actually experienced a negative one (i.e., those who had been overly optimistic) subsequently evaluated their experiences in a way that appeared to be more consistent with their initial expectations than with the experiences themselves. In their first study, students’ expectations about how much they would enjoy their winter vacations were found to influence their subsequent evaluations of their vacations, independent of how favorably they had reported their actual vacation experiences to be (similar results were obtained by Mitchell et al. (1997), who found that vacationers’ evaluations of their trips were lower during their trips than they either expected or recalled them to be). In Klaaren et al.’s second study, in which both expectations and the actual pleasantness of experience were manipulated, the induction of favorable expectations led people to evaluate the experience more favorably (regardless of whether the actual experience was pleasant), and to report greater willingness to repeat the experience by participating in the study again.

Similar results have been obtained in correlational analyses of the determinants of entrepreneurs’ satisfaction with their business ventures (Cooper & Artz, 1995). In this study, and counter to the researcher’s initial expectations, entrepreneurs’ level of satisfaction after three years of business ownership was positively related to their initial expectations (measured at startup) even after the performance of their businesses had been controlled. Together with the results of Klaaren et al.’s (1994) experiments, these results suggest that those who are the most optimistic going into a situation may be the most likely to view their outcomes favorably, regardless of whether their predictions are ultimately fulfilled. These results are the opposite of what one would expect if excessive optimism provided a strong point of contrast against which any lesser outcome would be seen as disappointing.

Shifting Standards of Comparison. In addition to direct reinterpretations of outcomes, people may avoid the ramifications of disconfirmed expectations by shifting the standard against which outcomes are evaluated. There are at least three ways in which these shifts may occur. First, people may simply forget their initial standard, thereby removing it as a basis for evaluating the outcomes they receive. Even in situations in which people claim to remember their initial predictions, their recollections may be distorted so that the predictions they recall are more in line with eventual outcomes than they actually had been (Fischhoff & Beyth, 1975). At least some evidence suggests that these distortions tend to be larger when initially positive expectations are disconfirmed by a negative outcome (Schkade & Kilbourne, 1991), as would occur if people’s initial expectations had been excessively optimistic.

Second, people may reevaluate the standard that they had initially set for themselves. In other words, people may respond to an otherwise obvious failure by questioning how reasonable their initial prediction had been. Because people make predictions in states ranging from partial to complete uncertainty, they may be more likely to disregard their initial (potentially naive) predictions than to accept the conclusion that they had failed to meet an entirely reasonable and indisputable goal. This sort of response is at least partly justifiable because people will have new information about the objective likelihood of the outcome, the difficulties involved in bringing about that outcome, and their own motives, qualities, and resources that may have been difficult (if not impossible) to ascertain at the time of the initial prediction. To the extent that this new information may influence retrospective evaluations of initial expectations, potential disappointment may fade with the newfound clarity of hindsight (cf. Fischoff, 1982).

A third strategy for shifting standards involves the selection of a worse-off social comparison target that allows the individual to maintain a belief that his or her current status is not as bad as more objective standards might suggest it would be (Taylor & Lobel, 1989). Results of studies with cancer patients, for example, have shown that patients at all levels of physical outcomes see themselves as somewhat better off than other cancer patients (except, perhaps, at the very end-stages of the disease; e.g., Wood, Taylor, & Lichtman, 1985). This constant advantage across physical conditions can be achieved, of course, only by manipulating and continually shifting the person or group with whom one compares oneself. So robust is this tendency that if a worse-off social comparison target is not available, people often generate hypothetical others who are “doing worse” for the purposes of these comparisons (Taylor, Wood, & Lichtman, 1983).

Getting What You Want by Revising What You Had. Another means by which people may effectively reinterpret their outcomes to be more in line with their initial expectations is to exaggerate progress by reinventing the past (Conway & Ross, 1984; Ross, 1989). In a classic demonstration, Conway and Ross (1984) found that students who had participated in an (ineffective) study-skills program misremembered their initial skills as being worse than they had originally reported them to be. By changing their views of their initial skill, students subsequently perceived their current (and unchanged) skill level to have improved by comparison. These results have generally been interpreted as being mediated by people’s naive theories of change in a situation of actual stability; the underestimation of past skills could thus be understood as a consequence of people assuming change when none occurred. To the extent that optimistic expectations imply an expectation of positive change, people may derogate their past out of a conviction that they have achieved something in the present.

Alternatives to Reinterpretation: Explaining Away Failure. One well-documented strategy for avoiding the disappointment associated with even the most clearly disconfirmed expectations involves the generation of excuses (e.g., Buehler et al., 1994; Gilovich, 1983; see also Snyder, 1989; Snyder & Higgins, 1988). Several lines of research suggest reasons why the generation of excuses may be especially common following the disconfirmation of optimistic expectations. First, research has shown that people are particularly likely to search for causal explanations for events that are negative or unexpected (Pyszczynki & Greenberg, 1981; Weiner, 1985; Wong & Weiner, 1981). Given that the disconfirmation of optimistic expectations will, by definition, be experienced as both negative and unexpected, the active search for causal explanations seems especially likely. Commonly observed attributional asymmetries – by which people take credit for positive outcomes and deny responsibility for negative ones (see Miller & Ross, 1975, for a review) – may then bias this search in favor of excuses. Second, to the extent that people recognize that their expectations have been disconfirmed, they often react with surprise, and surprise itself indicates that a mental representation of some more expected outcome has been activated and is being used as a point of contrast (e.g., Kahneman & Miller, 1986). The ready availability of initial expectations following the disconfirmation of these expectations may help maintain their plausibility and, as a consequence, provide rationale for explaining away the expectancy violation as having been the consequence of essentially random, unanticipatable factors. To the extent that past failures and the recognition of past failures at prediction are so promptly explained away, they are not likely to influence outcome evaluations, relevant self-evaluations (Snyder, 1989), or future predictions (Buehler et al., 1994; Gilovich, 1983).