It’s difficult to tell if a chicken is an optimist. After all, you can’t ask if a glass of water is half full or half empty. But you can repeatedly show a white card in front of a bowl with delicious mealworms and a black card in front of an empty bowl. Once the chick is confident in choosing the white card, show them the gray card. The chick who immediately turned to this card seemed to assume that it probably contained food since the card was white rather than black. This is the same as considering the glass half full. Based on this, it turns out that most chickens are indeed “optimistic”.
Optimistic behavior can also be tested and fine-tuned in many animals. European starlings will become more “optimistic” if you give them a bath whenever they want. Bottlenose dolphins exhibit more optimistic behavior when they swim in sync with each other. Bumblebees make more optimistic choices after being presented with an unexpected sweet treat.
These findings may seem outlandish, but the fact that some form of optimism is found in such a wide range of animals suggests that a positive outlook is important in our own lives and that it contributes to our well-being. This suggests that they are deeply connected. In recent years, these and other insights into how glass-half-full thinking can affect our health have begun to help us distinguish between different types of optimism. This allowed us to identify the type that would be good for us.
(Tag Translation) Psychology
