"Normal human thought and perception," Shelley Taylor writes in her 1989 book, "Positive Illusions," "is marked not by accuracy but by positive self-enhancing illusions about the self, the world, and the future.
In Japan and east Asia, far from living in a rose-tinted bubble of positive illusions, if anything you downplay your achievements.
Such "positive illusions," as they have been termed by Dr. Shelley E. Taylor, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Los Angeles, help people cope and maintain their buoyancy in a competitive and unpredictable world.
Johnson and Levin (2009) highlighted that positive illusions can disappear once an individual is directly affected by the hazard in question, and the risk is no longer hypothetical, but real.
However, this does not apply in the current study, because all respondents have experienced several floods, suggesting that positive illusions can persist regardless of personal experience with the actual hazard.
Positive illusions are more accurately understood as design features of a normal mind rather than a brain function failure.
According to Taylor, this re-establishment is based on so-called positive illusions.
Although positive illusions may create unrealistic and maybe 'false' ideas, these illusions have been found to be important resources [ 20].
Illusions contribute to the diversity of human responses to both information and circumstance, and positive illusions are well recognised in both health and illness, sometimes with beneficial outcomes (Taylor and Brown, 1988).
First, the majority of individuals have moderate positive illusions [ 25, 26], objectively unrealistic beliefs that positive things such as being healthy are more likely to happen to them and that negative events such as becoming ill will not happen personally to them or their child [ 27].
