The development of optimistic expectations in young children

Optimistic children engage in more constructive risk-taking behaviors

“…A significant interaction between age and winning tokens possible ( B = .33, SE = .12, t = 2.79, p = .006) revealed that older children were less likely than younger children to predict a winning token as winning tokens decreased (Table 3). These findings, which mirror those of 3- to 6-year-olds in prior work (Hennefield & Markson, 2022), suggest that children are optimistic while taking into account the true likelihood of the event happening, and with age are better able to integrate probabilistic information into their predictions.…”

“…Optimism Task. Optimism was assessed using a child-friendly version of a probabilistic reasoning task modeled on an adult card game (Lench & Ditto, 2008) and adapted for young children (Hennefield & Markson, 2022). Children played a computerbased game with sets that vary in ratio of "winning" to "losing"…”

“…Optimism is linked to positive attributes in adults including greater persistence during challenging tasks (Tenney et al, 2015), more positive beliefs about one’s abilities (Yu & Luo, 2018), and more effective use of coping strategies (Nes & Segerstrom, 2006). As cognitive biases such as optimism appear to be present early in development (e.g., Bamford & Lagattuta, 2020; Hennefield & Markson, 2022; Wente et al, 2020), optimism likely confers similar benefits in children. However, in situations with potentially serious consequences, such as high-risk physical activities, being overly optimistic may jeopardize children’s well-being.…”

Returning to reality: Why optimism declines in childhood

“…Young children also display wishful thinking in probabilistic reasoning tasks in which they have no control over the outcome 8,53,54 . For example, 5-year-olds are more likely than 7-year-olds to guess that an experimenter will draw a rare prize-winning blue egg out of a sample of mostly yellow eggs.…”

“…Using this approach, psychologists starting in the 1970s have documented a developmental decline in children's optimistic expectations between the ages of 3-10. These changes have been found in tasks that assess children's memory (e.g., tasks in which children are asked to estimate the number of items they will remember [1][2][3] ), motor performance (e.g., tasks in which children are asked how far they can jump or throw a ball [4][5][6] ), visual search (e.g., tasks in which children are asked to predict how many hidden objects they can find 7 ) and probabilistic reasoning tasks (e.g., tasks in which children must estimate the probability of a desirable randomly determined outcome 8,9 ; see Figure 1). These studies show that young children overestimate task performance to a greater degree than older children 10 .…”