Foreboding Amid Prosperity: Phantom Anxiety Theory and Abstract Pessimism

Abstract

The analyses drew on 38 independently conducted international surveys involving more than half a million respondents. The results demonstrate that higher national levels of human development, as indexed by the Human Development Index (HDI), are associated with more pessimistic expectations about the future. Leading theories of optimism/pessimism, negativity, threat processing, resource loss, and the determinants of hope predict patterns that are inconsistent with the empirical findings. This article posits the existence of endogenous anxious arousal analogous to the vigilance observed in prey animals. Such vigilance promoted survival in the environments that shaped the human nervous system but is evolutionarily mismatched to the modern world. Phantom anxiety theory predicts the observed effect—abstract pessimism—and specifies the conditions under which it should intensify; both predictions are supported by the data. The hypothesis of endogenous anxious arousal in humans also offers a new perspective on anxiety disorders and the evolutionary origins of sapientization.

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BibTeX

@misc{florkowski2026foreboding,
  title = {{Foreboding Amid Prosperity: Phantom Anxiety Theory and Abstract Pessimism}},
  author = {Marcin Florkowski},
  howpublished = {PsyArXiv},
  year = {2026},
  month = sep,
  doi = {10.31234/osf.io/7vsgc_v2},
  url = {https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/7vsgc_v2/},
  note = {CC BY 4.0},
}

RIS

TY  - UNPB
TI  - Foreboding Amid Prosperity: Phantom Anxiety Theory and Abstract Pessimism
AU  - Marcin Florkowski
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/09/17
PB  - PsyArXiv
DO  - 10.31234/osf.io/7vsgc_v2
UR  - https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/7vsgc_v2/
AB  - The analyses drew on 38 independently conducted international surveys involving more than half a million respondents. The results demonstrate that higher national levels of human development, as indexed by the Human Development Index (HDI), are associated with more pessimistic expectations about the future. Leading theories of optimism/pessimism, negativity, threat processing, resource loss, and the determinants of hope predict patterns that are inconsistent with the empirical findings. This article posits the existence of endogenous anxious arousal analogous to the vigilance observed in prey animals. Such vigilance promoted survival in the environments that shaped the human nervous system but is evolutionarily mismatched to the modern world. Phantom anxiety theory predicts the observed effect—abstract pessimism—and specifies the conditions under which it should intensify; both predictions are supported by the data. The hypothesis of endogenous anxious arousal in humans also offers a new perspective on anxiety disorders and the evolutionary origins of sapientization.
ER  -

Abstract

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