It’s hard to tell if the chicken is optimistic. After all, you can’t ask him if a glass of water is half full or half empty. But you can repeatedly show him a white card in front of a bowl of tasty treats and a black card in front of an empty bowl. After a chick learns to reliably choose the white card, you show it a gray card. Chicks who immediately think of this card look more white than black, so they think it probably contains food, the equivalent of a half-full glass. On this basis, most chickens become “optimistic”..
You can test the behavior similar to the optimism of many animals, and even fine-tune it. European starlings if they can take a bath when they want to become more “optimistic”.. Dolphins dolphins show more optimistic behavior if they have been swimming in synchrony with each other. Bumblebees make more optimistic choices after being given an unexpected sweet treat.
These findings may seem eccentric, but the fact that optimism somehow appears in a wide range of animals suggests that a positive outlook can be important in our lives and is closely related to our well-being. In recent years, these and other insights into how the glass-half-full mindset can affect our health have begun to help distinguish between different types of optimism. This has allowed us to identify the types that are good for us, and…
