Public positivity and private prudence: Differences in prescribed optimism for thoughts and appearances

Research on prescribed optimism has found that people generally believe others should be optimistic rather than realistic or pessimistic. We argue that previous studies on prescriptions have overlooked the social context, i.e., whether a future outlook is thought about privately or expressed publicly, with public contexts evoking self-presentation concerns that could increase the value of optimism. Four pre-registered experiments (total N = 1249) show that people think others should be more optimistic in public than in private. In Experiment 1 and 2, using hypothetical scenarios, participants prescribed more optimism for public appearances than for private thoughts in both within- and between-subjects comparisons. Experiment 3a and 3b investigated prescriptions for positive and negative events related to two current high-importance topics, climate change and AI. Again, results pointed towards more optimistic prescriptions for public expressions than for private thoughts, and additionally showed more optimistic prescriptions for a highly involved role (a CEO) than for less involved roles (scientist or average citizen). The findings suggest that people do not endorse biased thinking about the future as much as they endorse putting on a positive face. These social and reputational concerns may have implications for communication practices of leaders and officials, and could contribute to distorted, overoptimistic perceptions of the future among the public.