Optimistic assessments can be beneficial only if the general social conditions the optimistic assessor faces are relatively favorable, so that statistically acting on this optimism will be rewarded by trustworthiness. The huge genre of post-apocalypse films and novels of our time portray conditions in which trust is generally not justified. Life is impoverished beyond measure, with the demands of survival and struggle preempting almost all else. To have optimistic assessments in these conditions might be to risk suicide.

XREF: Connects to evolutionary psychology debates about whether optimistic biases are universally adaptive or context-dependent.

Russell Hardin, Trust and Trustworthiness, loc. 545