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4.3 POTENTIAL SOURCES OF ERRORS IN SOCIAL 
COGNITION : 
 
Human beings reason thoughtfully on most of the social 
occasions, does not guarantee us rationality of thinking. This 
means that though we try to be correct in our thought process, we 
are likely to make errors in our social judgments. We shall explore 
some errors in cognition.
4.3.1 Negativity Bias : 
 
Take following example: Niranjan is bright, helpful, social, 
jealous, and friendly person. Which adjective has attracted your 
attention the most. Perhaps, jealous…right…! This happens 
because of our tendency called as negativity bias. The tendency of
Human beings to pay more attention to negative information than 
positive information is called as negativity bias. Social 
psychologists have recognized this tendency of human beings for a 
long time.
Negativity bias refers to the tendency to show greater 
sensitivity to negative information than positive information.

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We pay more attention to any negative event, 
characteristics, etc., of social situation. This is seen in variety of 
social situations.
Such a tendency has a strong evolutionary relevance. 
Negative information reflects potentially dangerous aspects of the 
situation which may cause threat to the survival of the individual. 
Hence, one need to be sensitive to such an information. Human 
beings detect negative emotions very quickly than positive 
emotions. This does not mean that we are always negative in our 
attention. Indeed we also pay attention to positive information, and 
negativity bias gets eliminated under positive priming conditions. 
4.3.2 The Optimistic Bias :
 
We also have an exactly opposite bias called as ‘optimistic 
bias’. The optimistic bias refers to the tendency to expect the 
overall outcomes as positive. Generally, most people believe that 
they are more likely to experience positive events than others.
The optimistic bias refers to the tendency to expect the 
overall outcomes as positive. 
The effect of optimistic bias is seen on many of our actions 
and behaviors. Two examples are overconfidence barrier and 
planning fallacy.
Overconfidence barrier refers to tendency to be more 
confident about the accuracy of our judgments than sensible.
We believe that we are more likely to be successful in 
studies, relations, marriage, jobs, and live longer life than what 
seems reasonable. This bias is called as overconfidence barrier.
Another result of the optimism is planning fallacy. Planning 
fallacy is a tendency to make optimistic bias regarding the time 
estimations for a given task. We tend to believe that we will finish a 
task much earlier than what it would actually take. Think of your 
time-tables for examination studies. We typically never finish our 
studies in the planned time. Because we tend to be unrealistically 
optimistic in our estimations of time.
Planning fallacy is a tendency to believe that we can do 
more work in given period of time than actually or realistically is 
possible. 
The planning fallacy occurs because we tend to ignore how 
much time a particular task has taken in past. We tent to focus on 
future and make a narrative account. Even when we focus on past 

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we believe that we took more time because of the external factors 
outside our control which may not affect us now. So if we pay 
careful attention to potential obstacles, then we can correctly 
estimate the time required and avoid the planning fallacy.