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# Your Brain Overrates Your Future. Don't Fight It, Budget for It (Tali Sharot's Playbook)
- URL: https://longtalkshort.com/tali-sharot-optimism-bias-budget-for-it-persuade/
- Published: 2026-10-25T16:20:13.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-25T16:20:13.000Z
- Description: Your plans run late and your budgets run over, because your brain filters out bad news. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot's fix isn't gloom. It's a buffer, plus a few rules for persuading others.
- Author: Truman
- Tags: Psychology, Tali Sharot

**Your renovation will run long. Your budget will run over.** You knew that already, and you planned as if it wouldn't happen anyway.

That isn't a character flaw. It's how your brain handles news, and neuroscientist Tali Sharot has a surprisingly practical fix: **keep the hope, then budget for it.**

Sharot runs the Affective Brain Lab at University College London and holds an adjunct post at MIT. On *Young and Profiting*, Hala Taha asks her the question that comes after "we're all too optimistic": **so what do you actually do about it?** Her answer covers your forecasts, your news diet and how you persuade other people.

*Want the basics first? Our earlier piece,* [*why expecting the gold gets you the silver*](https://longtalkshort.com/tali-sharot-optimism-bias-expect-the-gold/)*, explains what the optimism bias is and why it's mostly good for you. This one is about living with it.*

*In short: keep your hopeful forecasts but add a buffer based on your past misses. Notice that good news gets in more easily than bad. To persuade, pair data with a story and give instant feedback. Some of her persuasion rules are softer in the research than they sound.*

## 1\. The experiment that failed in the most useful way

As a PhD student at NYU, Sharot studied traumatic memory, including scans of people who were in Manhattan on 9/11.

Her finding: **emotional memories feel like a videotape, but they're no more accurate than ordinary ones.** Each time we replay them, we rewrite them a little.

That pointed her to a bigger idea. Memory exists less to preserve the past than to build the future. The hippocampus that stores experience also lights up when we imagine what comes next.

So at Harvard she asked volunteers to imagine bad events, like a breakup or getting locked out. **They kept turning them good.** One imagined finding a better girlfriend. Another had the landlady show up with a key.

The study was ruined. Then she realized the habit was the finding.

But here's the twist most people miss: that rosy filter has a very specific target.

## 2\. Hopeful about me, gloomy about the world

About 80 percent of people show the bias in her tests. It dips under stress and hits its low in midlife.

The new point is scope. **The bias covers my life and my family's, not the world's.** On politics, the economy or climate, people lean pessimistic.

Climate surveys show the same split, she says. Catastrophe for the planet, but:

> my little town will be okay.

Worth remembering the next time the internet sounds apocalyptic. **The gloom is usually about society, not the person typing.**

![Two gauges side by side on a cream background. The left gauge, labeled Me and mine, for career, kids and town, points toward hopeful in green. The right gauge, labeled The world, for politics, economy and climate, points toward gloomy in terracotta. A note says the optimism bias applies to our own prospects, not society at large.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d7/93/d793216c-cf13-441f-bdae-4f3aef998c0e/content/images/2026/10/fig2-15.png)

The bias is personal: hopeful about our own lives, gloomy about the world. Illustrative, not real data. Made for Long Talk Short.

Personal optimism has a cost, though. And the fix comes from an unlikely place: a government spreadsheet.

## 3\. Don't fight the bias. Budget for it.

The downside of hope is that we skip precautions:

- No helmet.
- Too much financial risk.
- A renovation that runs long.

Sharot's fix isn't to talk yourself into gloom. **Keep the belief, and build a policy around it.**

Her model is the UK Treasury's **Green Book**, which tells planners to adjust cost and time estimates for optimism bias using the record of similar past projects. She says it was used for the London 2012 Olympics: look at past Games, measure how far forecasts missed, add that average error.

You can run the same system alone:

- **Predict.** Log forecasts on investments, hires or project timelines.
- **Note why.** Write down what you knew and how sure you felt.
- **Compare.** Check each forecast against what happened.
- **Adjust.** Over time you'll see your typical miss, and why: thin information or overconfidence. Add it to your next forecast.

![Four-step diagram titled Budget for the bias: predict, note why, compare, and adjust by adding your average past error to the next forecast. A panel notes that UK Treasury Green Book guidance tells planners to uplift estimates using data from comparable past projects.](https://storage.ghost.io/c/d7/93/d793216c-cf13-441f-bdae-4f3aef998c0e/content/images/2026/10/fig1-15.png)

A personal version of the Treasury's optimism-bias uplift, as Sharot describes it. Made for Long Talk Short.

Which raises the obvious question: if we keep missing, why don't we learn?

## 4\. Your brain has a good-news filter

Her lab's answer: **we update beliefs more after good news than bad.**

Say you expect a million listeners. Someone says two million, and you jump to 1.9 million. Someone says 50,000? You decide they have bad data and drop only to 900,000.

In the scanner, she says, the brain tracks better-than-expected news precisely and encodes worse-than-expected news sloppily.

The same tilt shapes what we go looking for. Alongside confirmation bias, she describes a **"desirability bias."** She cites a study of investors who logged into their accounts more when markets rose and avoided them when markets dipped, until a crash made looking unavoidable.

**Fake news, she argues, is built to exploit both.**

Once you know how information gets into a brain, you can use it to get your message into someone else's.

## 5\. Five rules for moving other people

The second half draws on her book *The Influential Mind*:

- **Frame toward the goal.** "Take route B and gain time and money" beats "route A loses you time and money." Threats get discounted: "my grandma smoked until 100."
- **Hope to start, fear to stop.** Reward drives action; threat drives freezing. To get people voting or wearing helmets, highlight the good.
- **Use social proof, progress and instant feedback.** "90 percent of people in your neighborhood buckle up," a step counter, a "well done" the moment you act. Social media bundles all three, which is why it hooks us.
- **Tell a story with the numbers.** "8,000 people got ill" moves people less than Maria, mother of two, who drank the water. Keep the data, but put a face on it.
- **Bribe yourself.** She admits she doesn't always wear her bike helmet. Her fix: a chocolate when she does, a donation to a charity she dislikes when she doesn't.

Persuasive stuff. But how much of it survives a check?

## Weighing it: what holds up

**The Green Book is real.** UK Treasury guidance requires explicit optimism-bias adjustments to costs, benefits and duration, based on comparable projects. For London 2012, the National Audit Office reported a programme contingency of about £2.7 billion, around 42 percent of the base budget, justified partly by optimism bias.

**The investor study checks out.** Karlsson, Loewenstein and Seppi found Swedish and U.S. investors checked portfolios more in rising markets (the "ostrich effect"). Later Vanguard data showed logins about 9 percent lower after declines, with the effect swamped in the 2008 crash.

**The memory claims match the literature.** Large 9/11 surveys found people's accounts drifted over the following year while their confidence stayed high. The good-news/bad-news updating finding is hers and replicated, though critics argue part of it is a statistical artifact of the task.

**The persuasion rules deserve caution.** Meta-analyses by Daniel O'Keefe and colleagues find gain-framed and loss-framed health messages differ little overall, so positive framing is a reasonable default, not a law. A 2015 meta-analysis of fear appeals (Tannenbaum and colleagues) found they generally do change attitudes and behavior, especially when paired with clear steps. **Fear doesn't simply freeze people.** The story-beats-statistics point has solid support (the identifiable victim effect). "Private optimism, public despair" fits long-running surveys, though her climate example came without a citation.

**Context.** The episode was recorded before her Cass Sunstein co-written book *Look Again* came out in February 2024, and includes a long host-read Pipedrive ad. The introduction calls her MIT faculty; UCL is her main post.

## Long Talk Short

- We rewrite bad imagined futures into good ones without noticing. That's the optimism bias.
- It's personal: good things for me, bad things for the world.
- Don't argue yourself out of hope. Log forecasts, measure your usual miss, add it back.
- Good news gets in more easily than bad, so seek out the numbers you're avoiding.
- To persuade, pair data with a person's story and give instant, visible feedback.
- Gain framing is a fine default, but fear with a clear action plan works too.

**The one thing to remember:** treat optimism like a known error in your instruments. Keep reading the gauge, then correct for it before you commit.

Source: Young and Profiting with Hala Taha, ["Dr. Tali Sharot: The NEUROSCIENCE of Positivity & Truths Behind Our OPTIMISM Bias."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwOtnpDB1E8&ref=longtalkshort.com) This is an independent summary of that episode and is not affiliated with the show.

*This article is for general information only and is not financial, medical or mental health advice.*