Ulterior Motives

How goals, both seen and unseen, drive behavior.

Unrealistic optimism about problem drinking is dangerous.

An important part of everyone's self-concept is a sense of how we compare to others in our behaviors. A common observation is that many people are overly optimistic in their judgments about themselves relative to others. For example, on average, people think they are more likely to be successful in business than others, or to be less likely to suffer from serious illnesses than others. Read More

Post new comment

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.
  • Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
  • Allowed HTML tags: <a> <em> <strong> <cite> <code> <ul> <ol> <li> <dl> <dt> <dd>
  • Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
  • You may quote other posts using [quote] tags.

More information about formatting options

Subscribe to Ulterior Motives

Art Markman, Ph.D., is a cognitive scientist at the University of Texas whose research spans a range of topics in the way people think.

more...