Is there any evidence on this? (I must admit, I didn't read the paper, just the abstract.)
> Optimist by choice, Pessimist by experience
Optimism vs. pessimism in a particular situation doesn't appear to me as being a choice. Can you really choose to be an optimist or is it just ignoring/suppressing your pessimism?
I don't know if there's evidence, but I find the point interesting because the idea occurred to me independently when I read this in the paper:
> Unrealistically optimistic financial expectations [...] can lead to excessive business entries and subsequent failures, as optimists overestimate the financial returns from entrepreneurship (de Meza et al., 2019)
I thought: Do pessimists overestimate the financial returns from a regular job?
It seems in many ways to be about whether/what risks are worth taking.
I am not sure I would agree. Try living in the snowy mountains without shelter and a fireplace. I'd bet optimism wouldn't help you a lot in that particular circumstance unless you'd have already secured the necessities for survival.
I think you’d need more pessimism to anticipate risks rather than optimism to believe that you can survive. The will to survive is somewhat hardwired anyway.