Health and life

Weinstein (1983, 1984) suggested that one of the reasons that people continue to practise unhealthy behaviours is due to inaccurate perceptions of risk and susceptibility – their unrealistic optimism. He asked subjects to examine a list of health problems and to state ‘compared to other people of your age and sex, what are your chances of getting [the problem] – greater than, about the same, or less than theirs?’ The results of the study showed that most subjects believed that they were less likely to get the health problem. Weinstein called this phenomenon unrealistic optimismas he argued that not everyone can be less likely to contract an illness. Weinstein (1987) described four cognitive factors that contribute to unrealistic optimism: (1) lack of personal experience with the problem; (2) the belief that the problem is preventable by individual action; (3) the belief that if the problem has not yet appeared, it will not appear in the future; and (4) the belief that the problem is infrequent. These factors suggest that perception of own risk is not a rational process.
In an attempt to explain why individuals’ assessment of their risk may go wrong, and why people are unrealistically optimistic, Weinstein (1983) argued that individuals show selective focus. He claimed that individuals ignore their own risk-increasing behaviour (‘I may not always practise safe sex but that’s not important’) and focus primarily on their risk-reducing behaviour (‘but at least I don’t inject drugs’). He also argues that this selectivity is compounded by egocentrism: individuals tend to ignore others’ risk-decreasing behaviour (‘my friends all practise safe sex but that’s irrelevant’). Therefore an individual may be unrealistically optimistic if they focus on the times they use condoms when assessing their own risk and ignore the times they do not and, in addition, focus on the times that others around them do not practise safe sex and ignore the times that they do.
In one study, subjects were required to focus on either their risk-increasing (‘unsafe sex’) or their risk-decreasing behaviour (‘safe sex’). The effect of this on their unrealistic optimism for risk of HIV was examined (Hoppe and Ogden 1996). Heterosexual subjects were asked to complete a questionnaire concerning their beliefs about HIV and their sexual behaviour. Subjects were allocated to either the risk-increasing or risk-decreasing condition. Subjects in the risk-increasing condition were asked to complete questions such as ‘since being sexually active how often have you asked about your partners’ HIV status?’ It was assumed that only a few subjects would be able to answer that they had done this frequently, thus making them feel more at risk. Subjects in the risk-decreasing condition were asked questions such as ‘since being sexually active how often have you tried to select your partners carefully?’ It was believed that most subjects would answer that they did this, making them feel less at risk. The results showed that focusing on risk-decreasing factors increased optimism by increasing perceptions of others’ risk. Therefore, by encouraging the subjects to focus on their own healthy behaviour (‘I select my partners carefully’), they felt more unrealistically optimistic and rated themselves as less at risk compared with those who they perceived as being more at risk.