The book almost wasn’t even released at all - Taylor’s publisher told him the book was “interesting, but no one’s going to want to read it”. The book covers “unrealistic optimism bias,” in which people in pandemics are prone to convincing themselves that it can’t or won’t happen to them. Think what happens when someone says “Eat your broccoli.”įollowing onto that is what psychologists term “motivated reasoning.” That’s when people stick with their story even if the facts obviously are contrary to it, as a form of “comforting delusion,” Taylor says. The denialists and refuseniks today are engaging in what the psychology field calls “psychological reactance.” It’s “a motivational response to rules, regulations, or attempts at persuasion that are perceived as threatening one’s autonomy and freedom of choice,” the book describes.
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It’s all based on basic psychology as to how people react to health emergencies. 74 undergraduate students were asked to rate how likely they were to encounter various negative consequences relative to various comparison targets (child, peer, and parent) and specified their actual involvement in risk-taking.
Unrealistic optimism persuaion download#
A lot of people believed the Spanish flu pandemic of 1918 was spread by the Germans through Bayer aspirin. The current study investigated risk perception and Unrealistic Optimism as a function of involvement in risk. The Unintended Consequences of Reframing Denial, Unrealistic Optimism, and Self-Deception Kondrat, Andy download BookSC. He has no crystal ball, he says, it’s just that all of this has happened before. The book came out pre-COVID and yet predicts every trend and trope we’ve been living for 19 months now: the hoarding of supplies like toilet paper at the start the rapid spread of “unfounded rumors and fake news” the backlash against masks and vaccines the rise and acceptance of conspiracy theories and the division of society into people who “dutifully conform to the advice of health authorities” - sometimes compulsively so - and those who “engage in seemingly self-defeating behaviors such as refusing to get vaccinated.” Thus, we aimed to investigate whether in the situation of an imminent coronavirus pandemic, people would still perceive themselves as being less exposed to the disease than others. He wrote a remarkable little book back in 2019 called “The Psychology of Pandemics.” Its premise is that pandemics are “not simply events in which some harmful microbe ‘goes viral,’” but rather are mass psychological phenomena about the behaviors, attitudes and emotions of people. Objective: The results of numerous empirical studies have showed the occurrence of so-called unrealistic optimism.
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Taylor would know because he predicted it. Participants included 660 college students who consented to complete a questionnaire. I don’t know if this is comforting or what, but psychologist Steven Taylor published a book two months before the start of the Covid-19 pandemic called The Psychology of Pandemics that predicted many of the behaviors we’ve been seeing over the past 18+ months, including masking backlash, the acceptance of conspiracy theories, vaccine resistance, and wholesale denial that the pandemic is even happening. This study examined links among unrealistic optimism, sex, and risk perception of type 2 diabetes onset in college students.