Of all the cognitive biases mentioned in the former text, the Optimism Bias is probably the one that many antinatalists consider as playing the most crucial role in procreation. Although I don’t entirely share this thought, the optimism bias sure has some role in procreation, and therefore is surely worth addressing.

The optimism bias, also referred to as “the Illusion of Invulnerability”, is people’s built-in cognitive tendency to underestimate the likelihood of them experiencing bad things, and to overestimate the likelihood of them experiencing good things. For example, people underestimate their chances of suffering from diseases or car accidents, no matter how they are specifically prone to them, or how prevalent diseases and car accidents are in general, and they overestimate their happiness potential no matter what their specific living conditions are.
The rational thing to do when trying to assess which events are more likely to happen, is using statistics and comparative data, but being irrational, people tend to think that events are more likely to happen, if they want them to happen, and are less likely to happen if they don’t want them to happen.

One example illustrating the optimism bias and its effect on children is the rates of divorce. Despite that people know that the chances of them splitting up are almost 50%, they are creating people together anyway. That is because they are sure that it would never happen to them (almost all people are certain that there is a zero chance that their marriage will end in a divorce, and amazingly that includes the ones who have already been divorced), as all the bad things always happen to someone else, and because they are too careless about the dire consequences divorce has on children.

An indication of the optimism bias taken from the field of Neuropsychology is that bad news and good news are not encoded in the same areas of the brain, and good news are encoded better than bad news. The brain treats bad news like a shock and good news like a reward, so it is no surprise that people seek for, focus on, and remember good news, and that they always try to avoid, disregard and forget bad news.
When we are telling people that bad things will happen to them, or to their children, unconsciously, their brain vigorously distorts that information until it gets a satisfying picture.

Having said all that, I wish it was the case that people create new people because they are sure that they would have good lives. Unfortunately people are creating new people because they are sure it would make their own lives good.
The optimism bias is not the factor that enables people to breed. People are too careless for such a cognitive mechanism to be required for them to put others at risk. They would have (and many of them do) created new people even if they weren’t naturally biased for optimism.
The optimism bias doesn’t play such a crucial role in people’s decision to breed, as most are not even thinking about the lives of their children, but it does help them to so easily reject antinatalism.

Unfortunately making people aware of their optimism bias is pointless, since becoming aware of it does not cancel its effect, it doesn’t shatter the illusion. Researchers who have attempted to reduce the optimism bias, mainly in order to decrease risky behaviors, found that it is incredibly difficult. In studies that involved attempts to reduce the optimism bias through actions such as educating participants about risk factors and to carefully consider high-risk options, researchers have found that these attempts led to little change and in some instances actually increased the optimism bias.

So the optimism bias is here to stay. People are naturally biased for optimism, therefore there is no much point in trying to informatively influence them towards realism. They are not cognitively built nor want to handle reality. Therefore, in a way, antinatalists who keep trying to inform people are optimistically biased as well. They keep hoping that someday people would change, despite the absence of any evidence to support such an option, and despite multiple evidences supporting the conclusion that we must change them ourselves.

References

Bandura, A. (1997). Self-efficacy: The exercise of control. New York: W.H. Freeman and Company

Dardenne B, Leyens JP (1995). “Confirmation Bias as a Social Skill”. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. 21 (11): 1229–1239. doi:10.1177/01461672952111011

de Meza D, Dawson C (January 24, 2018). “Wishful Thinking, Prudent Behavior: The Evolutionary Origin of Optimism, Loss Aversion and Disappointment Aversion”. SSRN 3108432

Donna Rose Addis, Alana T. Wong, and Daniel L. Schacter, “Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future: Common and Distinct Neural Substrates During Event Construction and Elaboration,” Neuropsychologia 45, no. 7 (2007): 1363–77, doi:10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2006.10.016

Enzle, Michael E.; Michael J. A. Wohl (March 2009). “Illusion of control by proxy: Placing one’s fate in the hands of another”. British Journal of Social Psychology. 48 (1): 183–200
doi:10.1348/014466607×258696. PMID 18034916

False Uniqueness Bias (SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY) – IResearchNet”. 2016-01-13

Gilovich T (1993). How We Know What Isn’t So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 978-0-02-911706-4

Gino, Francesca; Sharek, Zachariah; Moore, Don A. (2011). “Keeping the illusion of control under control: Ceilings, floors, and imperfect calibration”. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 114 (2): 104–114. doi:10.1016/j.obhdp.2010.10.002

Jonathon D. Brown and Margaret A. Marshall, “Great Expectations: Optimism and Pessimism in Achievement Settings,” in Optimism and Pessimism: Implications for Theory, Research, and Practice, ed. Edward C. Chang (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2000), pp. 239–56

Kokkoris, Michail (2020-01-16). “The Dark Side of Self-Control”. Harvard Business Review. Retrieved 17 January 2020

Kruger J, Dunning D (December 1999). “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 77 (6): 1121–34. CiteSeerX 10.1.1.64.2655. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121. PMID 10626367

Kruger J (August 1999). “Lake Wobegon be gone! The “below-average effect” and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgments”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 77(2): 221–32. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.77.2.221. PMID 10474208

McKenna, F. P. (1993). “It won’t happen to me: Unrealistic optimism or illusion of control?”. British Journal of Psychology. 84 (1): 39–50. doi:10.1111/j.2044-8295.1993.tb02461.x

Michael F. Scheier, Charles S. Carver, and Michael W. Bridges, “Optimism, Pessimism, and Psychological Well-being,” in Chang, ed., Optimism and Pessimism, pp. 189–216

Nickerson RS (1998). “Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises” (PDF). Review of General Psychology. 2 (2): 175–220 [198]. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.2.175

Oswald ME, Grosjean S (2004). “Confirmation Bias”. In Pohl RF (ed.). Cognitive Illusions: A Handbook on Fallacies and Biases in Thinking, Judgement and Memory. Hove, UK: Psychology Press. pp. 79–96. ISBN 978-1-84169-351-4. OCLC 55124398

Pacini, Rosemary; Muir, Francisco; Epstein, Seymour (1998). “Depressive realism from the perspective of cognitive-experiential self-theory”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 74 (4): 1056–1068. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.74.4.1056. PMID 9569659

Thompson, Suzanne C.; Armstrong, Wade; Thomas, Craig (1998). “Illusions of Control, Underestimations, and Accuracy: A Control Heuristic Explanation”. Psychological Bulletin. 123 (2): 143–161. doi:10.1037/0033-2909.123.2.143. PMID 9522682