 They laughed at me when I was a child told me that Star Wars was for dorks. I wonder who's laughing now. I Tried to tell them you don't know the power of the dork side There are less than 48 hours left. I should get some sleep. Can I sleep? I don't think I can sleep Does Darth Vader ever sleep? Maybe he sleeps in that weird spherical meditation chamber thing Or does he just meditate in there? Why do Sith Lords meditate anyways? I thought that there were supposed to be about anger and passion and stuff Maybe he has a bunch of pictures of things that just make him really angry in there Yes, if this is your first time watching the show I am a huge fan of Star Wars and I'm very excited for the new movies as you can see I'm totally prepared to go geek out in line with a bunch of fellow geeks for a couple of hours And it's pretty damned obvious that I'm not the only one I mean Disney marketing is something special But the incessant cultural celebration and advertisement for a new Star Wars movie that might actually be good is Approaching truly hysteric levels Star Wars the t-shirt Star Wars the coloring book Star Wars the lunchbox Star Wars the breakfast cereal Star Wars the flamethrower the kids love that one. No, but seriously This is beyond absurd. There's new Star Wars branded merchandise everywhere You can buy the Force Awakens branded makeup and produce for goodness sake. There aren't even any movies yet Understandably, there's a few people who recognize just how out of hand this whole Star Wars zeitgeist is getting and are telling people to temper their expectations With good reason at the current level of marketing hype for this new movie Coupled with genuine fan enthusiasm, which has somehow been resurrected from the ashes of the prequel trilogy This film is going to need to bring at least a dozen people back from the dead or un-sink Atlantis to live up to the hype It simply can't be done But there's another position beyond that call for levelhead in this a more severe countercurrent to the current hysteria Some people be they cynics or pessimists or whatever Assert that the most reasonable position to hold with respect to the Force Awakens or any new media or anything Is to believe that it's going to suck until proven otherwise The intuitive argument for this point of view is that a pessimistic approach avoids the possibility of something like what happened with the prequel trilogy where elation and excitement Nose dived into absolute horror at the discrepancy between our expectations and Supposedly if you're cautiously pessimistic being wrong just means being pleasantly surprised Whereas being right is cushioned by smug satisfaction and I told you so optimism only leaves room for disappointment Interestingly, there is a scientific basis for not buying into hype Optimism bias is a documented psychological phenomenon sort of like an optical illusion for prediction When we're trying to figure out what's going to happen human brains imagine the best-case scenario Rather than what's most likely there are several manifestations of this principle up to 80% of drivers think that they're better than average And a similar proportion of married couples believe that their marriage is going to last longer than average Also, if you ask someone how much time they'll probably need on average to complete a certain task and then ask them How much time they'd need in the absolute best-case scenario where everything goes, right? The difference between those two numbers isn't as large as you might think Optimism bias leads people to poor decision-making in all sorts of different ways And it may very well apply to predictions of the quality of a new Star Wars movie I mean if the original trilogy was really good and the prequel trilogy was really bad Then on average we should kind of expect a new movie to be kind of However, that's not the whole story accurate predictions are great for making decisions But we're talking about something that's way more complicated than taking a checkbox somewhere that says good or bad What we really want is to optimize that whole Star Wars hype expectations audience behavior satisfaction system to get the best results and there's some compelling evidence That the cynic's pundit square isn't the most important thing to consider for that in their 2014 paper waiting for Merlot Anticipatory consumption of experiential and material purchases Psychology researchers Kumar killingsworth and Jilovich studied what they called hedonic differences between different sorts of consumer behavior Basically, how much pleasure people derived from different sorts of purchases while a lot of research had already been performed on how buying different things Affected people after the purchase Kumar and friends realized that there was a whole bunch of enjoyment that people got Before buying something that was totally unaccounted for they used several different methods to collect information about the before and After of purchases and they discovered some very interesting trends For example compared to material goods like a new car or a flat-screen TV Experiential goods like a vacation or comic-con tickets tended to produce more long-lasting happiness The hedonic spike that you get when you buy some cool new toy fades rapidly as you become accustomed to it being there While experiences are more of a slow burn Contributing the happiness as fond memories, which you recall again and again But here's the bit that's especially interesting for our problem according to the study's findings There is more total happiness in the time leading up to a purchase than there is in the time following it Making anticipation responsible for a greater proportion of consumer satisfaction than anything else Apparently having isn't so pleasing a thing as wanting. It may not be logical, but it appears to be true Sorry, that was a Star Trek reference. I don't know where that came from If that's the case whatever the quality of the new Star Wars movie whether it's as Disappointing as Jar Jar Binks or as impossibly fantastic as Disney's marketing department would have us believe These days leading up to it are where the lion's share of the enjoyment for it lie In that the cynic's ideal of pleasantly surprised is emitting a large part of the picture by suppressing their enthusiasm They're missing out on most of the fun. Of course remembering our psychological tendency for optimism bias. They may well be right It may suck big time that possibility is much more likely than our intuitions would have us believe and it's Nigh impossible that it will live up to the current insanity of hype. I mean people have BB8 tattoos already There is a trailer. That's it But that shouldn't stop any Star Wars fans from enjoying and relishing in the excitement I mean, it's so cool to live in a world That's this excited about a space opera where I get to wear this costume out on the town tomorrow night and carry around a lightsaber and full view of everyone and for a brief moment the geeks will have inherited the earth This is an awesome time to be a fan of sci-fi and I hope that you'll join me in freaking out a little bit May the force be with you. Have you ever experienced optimism bias? What do you think is in Vader's meditation chamber? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to blah blah subscribe blah share and don't stop thunking