Leaning Toward Realism: Building Expectations From the Data

Letting the data set the expectation

You don’t decide in advance whether something will go well or badly. You’d rather wait and see the data.

The realistic profile describes a way of forming expectations without a stable lean toward either optimism or pessimism.

A quiz label, grounded in research

The research of Michael Scheier and Charles Carver (1985) treats optimism and pessimism as fairly stable general expectations. Their scale has no category called “realistic”: people who score in the middle simply have a moderate general expectation.

The realistic profile is therefore a label specific to this quiz. It’s defined by statements such as “I prefer to form an opinion after reviewing the facts, not before” or “I evaluate each situation separately, without a fixed pattern of expecting good or bad outcomes.” It doesn’t measure how much you expect from the future, but how that expectation is formed: from the concrete information of each case.

What research knows about seeing things as they are

Preferring to match your expectations to the data deserves more credit than it might seem, because the human mind tends to drift in a positive direction.

In a widely cited review, Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown (1988) gathered evidence that most healthy people hold mild positive illusions: they rate themselves above average, overestimate their control over events and are more optimistic about their future than the data justify. Their thesis, later debated, was that these illusions support well-being.

For years, people in a low mood were thought to be the exception, sadder but more accurate (Alloy and Abramson, 1979). The meta-analysis by Moore and Fresco (2012), covering 75 studies and 7,305 participants, found that this “depressive realism” is very small (d = -0.07) and that both groups show a positive bias, larger in people without symptoms. The useful takeaway for this profile: accuracy doesn’t depend on mood, but on the method you use to look.

The planning fallacy, a concrete example

The best-studied case is deadlines. Roger Buehler, Dale Griffin and Michael Ross (1994) asked senior psychology students to estimate when they would finish their honors thesis. The average estimate was 33.9 days and the actual average was 55.5; only about 30% finished by the date they had predicted.

The interesting part is why. When predicting, people focused on their plan for that specific task and set aside their own experience with similar tasks, which had nearly always run long. The realistic profile’s way of thinking, which starts from the facts rather than from the hoped-for scenario, runs in exactly the opposite direction to that bias.

An everyday example: facing a kitchen remodel, a realistic person doesn’t just ask what the quote says, but how far their friends’ recent remodels ran over. With that figure in hand, they build in extra time and money before starting.

How it shows up day to day

• You form an opinion after reviewing the facts, not before you have them.
• You’re as wary of inflated expectations as of catastrophic ones that aren’t backed by concrete data.
• You don’t carry a fixed pattern of expectations from one situation to the next: each is weighed on its own.
• Your opinion shifts easily as soon as relevant new information appears.

Where this profile can fall short

The real risk is slowness. In contexts where information will never be complete, waiting for more data can delay decisions that, at some point, have to be made on partial information anyway. Total certainty rarely arrives on time.

In group decisions, this calibrated judgment tends to temper both other people’s enthusiasm and their catastrophizing. When the context calls for moving quickly despite uncertainty, the contribution of more optimistic profiles complements it well.

Neither expecting the worst nor the best by default

Julie Norem and Nancy Cantor (1986) showed that defensive pessimism, actively anticipating what could go wrong, works well for a certain kind of person, just as an optimistic strategy works for others. That pattern is explored in the article on the cautious profile.

The realistic profile doesn’t start from either mold. It can take a careful approach to a high-stakes decision and a more confident one to a low-stakes decision, depending on what the data say in each case. That ability to switch, rather than any underlying indecision, is its defining trait.

This result describes a self-reported tendency, not a diagnosis. Want to see exactly where you sit between optimism, realism and strategic caution? Take the quiz on your expectation style.

Sources

• Scheier, M. F., and Carver, C. S. (1985). Optimism, coping, and health: Assessment and implications of generalized outcome expectancies. Health Psychology, 4(3), 219-247.
• Taylor, S. E., and Brown, J. D. (1988). Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health. Psychological Bulletin, 103(2), 193-210. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.103.2.193
• Alloy, L. B., and Abramson, L. Y. (1979). Judgment of contingency in depressed and nondepressed students: Sadder but wiser? Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 108(4), 441-485. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.108.4.441
• Moore, M. T., and Fresco, D. M. (2012). Depressive realism: A meta-analytic review. Clinical Psychology Review, 32(6), 496-509. doi:10.1016/j.cpr.2012.05.004
• Buehler, R., Griffin, D., and Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the “planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366-381. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.366
• Norem, J. K., and Cantor, N. (1986). Defensive pessimism: Harnessing anxiety as motivation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51(6), 1208-1217.