People believe that “Bad things will not happen to me,” thereby displaying a sense of unique invulnerability. To vivify the role of such illusions, students in a graduate course covering self-illusions received information based on actuarial tables about the average age of dying and then reported their estimated ages of death. In Class 1, students overestimated their age of death by 9 years. In Class 2, in which students were expressly told that the demonstration would show their sense of unique invulnerability, they again overestimated their age of death by 9 years. Closing comments explore the tenacity of unique invulnerability.
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