why we fail to imagine the worst
"What's the worst that can happen?" is a common refrain in the West. It's also based on unjustified optimism.
I'm going to start with an opinion that I admit is based on personal experience. In the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump's wildest and most unhinged rhetoric was dismissed for two reasons. The first is that during his first term, many of his worst ideas were ignored or reduced to a weird social media post by professionals and an active Congress. The second is a popular opinion that if Trump ever did something really, truly, profoundly bad, proper adults would step in to stop him.
This is why people seem absolutely stunned that he's faced very little pushback in running up inflation, ushering in stagflation, starting new wars, using the DOJ as his personal legal hitman, weaponizing ICE not to enforce immigration laws but to conduct ethnic cleansing with lethal force, hired a bunch of loyal sycophants whose only qualification was how hard they kissed all four of his cheeks, and meanwhile, Congress is nowhere to be found, the Supreme Court is mostly a rubber stamp, and the GOP is trying to recreate Mao's Cultural Revolution.
What happened? Where are the adults to stop the damage and restore the sanity we're counting on again? Well, they were fired. And continue to be fired as soon as they speak up. There is no one coming to save us on a white horse, carrying some majestic gleaming sword of sanity. The system failed because the guardrails were ignored, and far too many voters were sure this wouldn't happen because they just couldn't imagine it happening.
Sadly, it turns out that this optimism is actually a very common thing and people in the West consistently underestimate systemic and societal failures according to a new study. It's not exactly that we just assume everything will magically all work out in the end. It's that we're more less conditioned to think that we have a much better grip on things than we really do by a media that avoids talking about where things simply aren't working.
After studying 2.4 million articles, the researchers found that failures and systemic problems are either swept under the rug, or discussed nowhere near as often as a successful outcome. Even more interesting, exposing people to far more balanced media diets rapidly made them more realistic and accurate in estimating chances of something important going wrong with no one waiting to jump in and fix it.
What this means is that if we train our algorithms to only show us sunshine and rainbows and bunnies and how our favorite politicians are just being amazing at politics, we will very much fall into the pattern of assuming that nothing could go all that wrong. And if the news media keeps glossing over actual problems and downplays the ones it does acknowledge as under control or in good hands, a lot of people will remain delusional about both current events and the future.
See: Eskreis-Winkler, L., et al. (2026). The failure gap. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 130(3), 485–507 DOI: 10.1037/pspa0000468
