From John Bell, Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire, UK
You report that being an optimist tends to lead to better outcomes, and yet I can’t help thinking that the cause/effect might be the other way around. The initial example about the bee seems to underline that possibility, where a positive experience makes the bee more optimistic. If our brains are working at a fundamentally Bayesian level, their model of the world would be updated with positive or negative outcomes, and so those with more good things going on would naturally become more optimistic (4 January, p 32).
