Experts Show People Are Inherently Optimistic

It would appear that there are no things that can bring humans as a whole down and make them pessimistic, the results of a new study conducted by experts at the University of Kansas and the Gallup Organization shows. The research reveals that, despite the worldwide problems of the swine flu outbreak and global warming, as well as hardships, poverty and famine, people tend to keep their optimism, though admittedly not at the same level around the world. However, the paper points out that even in areas where people would be in their right to be pessimistic, positive feelings of the future actually surpass negative ones significantly.

The new paper, which will be presented later today at the annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, held in San Francisco, the United States, basically suggests that optimism is universal and without borders, and that living in a developed or a third-world country only influences the amount of positive feelings people have, but not their existence altogether. The data used for this investigation were collected from the Gallup World Poll, which included participants from 140 countries. Thus, the researchers worked with a population sample representative for 95 percent of all people in the world today.

More than 150,000 adults were surveyed during the study, and the researchers were puzzled to learn that seemingly important factors, such as age and household income, actually bared little influence on the answers the participants gave to the investigators' questions. Upon completion of their inquiry, the research team learned that 89 percent of all people they questioned felt the next five years would be the same or better than the last, while 95 percent of them said that their lives in the next five years would definitely be better or, worst case scenario, the same as the lives they were living at the moment.

“These results provide compelling evidence that optimism is a universal phenomenon,” explained the lead researcher of the new study, Matthew Gallagher. He is currently a psychology doctoral candidate at the University of Kansas. He added that the United States ranked 10th in the world's top of most optimistic nations. The first four places were occupied by the people of Ireland, Brazil, Denmark, and New Zealand, while the last places went to citizens of Zimbabwe, Egypt, Haiti and Bulgaria.