INHE 1003 Week 1 Discussion Post Example

Week 1 Discussion: From Everyday Explanation to Psychological Claim

"It Won't Happen to Me" as a Testable Claim: A Discussion Post Turning an Everyday Explanation for Skipping Sunscreen Into Optimistic Bias, Naming the Comparison a Study Would Make and What a Gap Would and Would Not Show

The Everyday Explanation

People often say that others skip sunscreen because they assume a sunburn, or skin cancer, happens to somebody else. That sounds like an explanation, but as it stands it is not yet a psychological claim, because nothing in it could turn out to be false: any person who skips sunscreen can be said to have assumed it would not happen to them.

Naming the Bias

Psychology turns the saying into something testable by naming it. Weinstein (1980) described what he called unrealistic optimism, often now called optimistic bias: the tendency for people to rate their own chances of experiencing a negative event as lower than those of an average peer. In his first study, college students compared their own odds of various future events, good and bad, with their classmates' chances, and on average they rated themselves as less likely than others to experience negative events. Restated this way, the sunscreen explanation becomes a claim: people who skip sunscreen rate their own risk of sun damage as lower than the risk of people like them.

The Comparison a Study Would Make

A study would ask a group of people two questions: how likely are you to get a bad sunburn this summer, and how likely is the average person your age? It would compare the two ratings for each person. If, on average, people rate themselves as less likely than the average peer, that gap is the bias. Shepperd et al. (2013), reviewing three decades of this research, point out that such a comparison shows an optimistic bias at the level of a group, because not everyone can be below average, but it cannot show that any one person's rating is wrong, since some people really are at lower risk.

What the Gap Would and Would Not Show

A gap would show that the group, as a whole, sees itself as safer than it can be. It would not show that the bias causes skipping sunscreen. People who skip sunscreen might rate their risk low because they skip sunscreen and have not been burned, rather than the other way around. Testing whether the bias leads to the behavior would need a different kind of study, for example measuring risk ratings first and sunscreen use later. The course textbook makes the same distinction between describing a pattern and explaining it (Spielman et al., 2020).

Reply to Marcus

Marcus, you explain late-night snacking as "people just don't think about it." Could that be restated so a study could check it? For example, if people who snack late report fewer thoughts about health at night than in the morning, that would be a claim with a comparison in it.

Reply to Lena

Lena, your example of people not wearing seat belts on short trips fits optimistic bias well. One question: would a study need to ask about short trips specifically? People might rate their risk differently for a five-minute drive than for a long one, and that difference could be the most interesting finding.

References

Shepperd, J. A., Klein, W. M. P., Waters, E. A., & Weinstein, N. D. (2013). Taking stock of unrealistic optimism. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(4), 395-411. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691613485247

Spielman, R. M., Jenkins, W. J., & Lovett, M. D. (2020). Psychology 2e. OpenStax. https://openstax.org/details/books/psychology-2e

Weinstein, N. D. (1980). Unrealistic optimism about future life events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(5), 806-820. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.39.5.806