Hopeful Thinking: How Simple Optimism Can Ensure A Better Future

Communities across our country are riddled with holes: empty store fronts that are peepholes through which you can see a once thriving business destination.  When I see these vacant spaces, I get depressed.  And we all probably (understandably) get depressed thinking about the tough economic times we face.  Thankfully, we may be genetically inclined to hope for a better future, hopeful thinking which in turn can have realistic benefits for our community.

Tali Sharot, neuroscientist and author of the new book The Optimism Bias: A Tour of the Irrationally Positive Brain, argues that we are more optimistic (even if irrational) than we are realistic.  What Sharot calls the “Optimism Bias” is our cognitive predisposition to believe that the future will be better than the past or the present.  We are more likely to see the glass half full.

Sharot believes the optimism bias protects and inspires us.  “To make progress,” Sharot writes in a May 28, 2011 Time article, “we need to be able to imagine alternative realities — better ones — and we need to believe that we can achieve them. Such faith helps motivate us to pursue our goals.”  In fact, Sharot argues that without this bias our ancestors may not have taken the risks necessary to carry civilization forward. 

More importantly than the bias itself, is the potential for the bias to improve our reality.  In the same Time article, Sharot explains that our hopeful expectations “become self-fulfilling by altering our performance and actions, which ultimately affects what happens in the future.”  Put another way, our actual future depends on our hopes for the future.

For our local communities, this means that our personal individual psychological expectations – even if seemingly irrational and lofty optimistic ones – have realistic actual consequences for our community.  If we imagine our communities’ downtown thriving, we are more likely to fulfill that vision by shopping there instead of, say, on Amazon.com.  Likewise, if we imagine our own children receiving a diverse and rewarding education, then we are more likely to vote to increase funding for free education for all.  Or if we imagine less traffic, we may very well find ourselves taking public transit more frequently.

 

Staying hopeful is not always easy.  But doing so will have a real impact on the future in which we live.  Our realized community will only be as great as the one we can realize.