id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-260673-gf028lf6	Bottemanne, Hugo	Does the Coronavirus Epidemic Take Advantage of Human Optimism Bias?	2020-08-26		.txt	text/plain	3397	150	45	Building on evidence from past epidemics and three decades of research in psychology suggesting that various cognitive biases influence beliefs about life hazards, we propose that such cognitive biases have contributed to the discrepancy between early warnings about the danger of SARS-CoV-2 and slow growth of consideration for these warnings. Importantly, data collected in Western countries during the peak of the COVID 19 pandemic provides direct evidence favoring the hypothesis that unrealistic optimism has played a role in the apparent discrepancy between official warnings and individual beliefs about the consequences of the pandemic for oneself: When getting infected and infecting others became frequent events as the number of cases and deaths sharply increased, citizens in the US, Europe and the United Kingdom estimated their probability of getting infected with the virus and of subsequently infecting others as lower for themselves than for someone else (Dolinski et al., 2020; Kuper-Smith et al., 2020) .	./cache/cord-260673-gf028lf6.txt	./txt/cord-260673-gf028lf6.txt