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Whenever people experience specific medical symptoms, they might research it online and find out that there is a possibility of a certain cancer being the culprit, they then might see that the chances of getting that cancer is 1 in a million. So they would often shrug it off as "Well that will never happen to me!", whereas that same person might go to the local store to purchase a lottery ticket that has a chance of winning set at 1 in 30 million and they then feel like the chance is high enough to win.

I am looking to find out if there is a particular name for this type of behaviour / thought process. I'm interested in research papers regarding these behaviours.

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    $\begingroup$ I think there's a lot in this interesting question. Possible terms that may contribute here are: Confirmation Bias, Planning Fallacy, certain kind of misalignment between Conscious and Subconscious i.e. Self-Regulation, further the non-intuitive nature of Statistic models and Game Theory. I guess other people have clarified this question already, so I would like to try to find a point or a paper to all this soon. $\endgroup$
    – peter_the_oak
    Nov 1, 2019 at 8:48
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    $\begingroup$ Also these seem to be important: Loss Aversion, and Risk Aversion. My guts tell me that there are soon enough mosaic stones for a reasoned answer :-) $\endgroup$
    – peter_the_oak
    Nov 3, 2019 at 10:16

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This is called optimism bias:

... a tendency for people to overestimate their likelihood of experiencing a wide variety of pleasant events, such as enjoying their first job or having a gifted child, and somewhat underestimate their risk of succumbing to negative events, such as getting divorced or falling victim to a chronic disease.

Optimism bias is a type of self-enhancement:

... a preference for positive over negative self-views.

and positive illusions:

... unrealistically favorable attitudes that people have towards themselves or to people that are close to them.

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