Moral Self-Perception Predicts Unrealistic Optimism Towards COVID-19 Infection

This is the data package of Chapter 3 of How Hwee Ong's dissertation. Unrealistic optimism refers to the tendency to believe that one’s future will be more favorable than warranted. Against the backdrop of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we conducted two studies to examined if the extent of unrealistic optimism towards COVID-19 infection is associated with (i) how moral they perceive themselves to be, and (ii) how much suffering they perceived they had experienced. While perceived suffering was not associated with the extent of unrealistic optimism, we found that people who perceived themselves to be more moral exhibited greater levels of unrealistic optimism. This finding furthers our understanding of the theoretical underpinnings of unrealistic optimism by indicating that unrealistic optimism may be at least in part due to a general expectation that moral behavior will be rewarded. It further suggests that a function of such a ‘good behavior-good outcome’ association could be to help cope with threats.

这是How Hwee Ong博士论文第3章的数据包。不切实际的乐观主义（Unrealistic Optimism）指的是一种倾向，即相信个人未来会比合理预期的更有利。在持续的COVID-19大流行背景下，我们开展了两项研究，旨在考察个体对COVID-19感染的不切实际乐观程度与以下两点是否相关：（i）其自我感知的道德水平；（ii）其感知到的自身经历的痛苦程度。虽然感知到的痛苦与不切实际乐观程度无关，但我们发现，自我感知道德水平更高的个体表现出更强烈的不切实际乐观倾向。这一发现通过揭示不切实际的乐观主义可能至少部分源于对道德行为会得到回报的普遍预期，深化了我们对其理论基础的理解。该发现还表明，这种"良好行为-良好结果"关联的一个作用可能是帮助应对威胁。