An optimistic learning bias leads people to update their beliefs in response to better-than-
expected good news but neglect worse-than-expected bad news. Because evidence
suggests that this bias arises from self-concern, we hypothesized that a similar bias may
affect beliefs about other people's futures, to the extent that people care about others. Here,
we demonstrated the phenomenon of vicarious optimism and showed that it arises from
concern for others. Participants predicted the likelihood of unpleasant future events that …

The learning rate, which indicated how well the estimation error predicted the subsequent
update, was the unstandardized regression coefficient indicating the strength of the
relationship between the estimation error and the subsequent update.[...] Then, when the
significant, F (1, 66)= 0.24, p=. 62, indicating that the words “Estimation of happening?”
appeared on the size of the optimistic learning bias was similar for the screen, participants
were prompted to enter the per-self and friend conditions.[...] The learning rate is the …