The recent AXA Life Outlook Index survey found that, out of the people in eight countries in Asia, Singaporeans are the least optimistic about their future. Against the regional average score of 71.6 (on a scale of 1 to 100, from least to most optimistic), Singaporeans scored just 59.2 while the folks in India and China were the most optimistic, scoring in the high 80s.

Perhaps we just like to whine a tad too much when we are actually quite contented. After all, the survey covering career, retirement, family, and health issues was conducted in August, when the Government began taking up the somewhat depressing issue of retirement planning. Compulsory measures - who likes them? - such as longevity insurance were being mooted. That talk might have been a mood downer for many of us.

In most places, government initiatives do shape the national discourse, and thus general sentiment, to a significant extent. This week, for example, a new Bangkok study revealed that while its residents had scored 7.98 out of a maximum of 10 points on a happiness scale back in September last year, this had fallen to 5.66 last month. Unhappy Bangkok residents attributed it to what they felt was the military government not having done enough for them.

Now back to the AXA survey, which found that Singaporeans were not confident if they could cope with what they perceived to be rapidly rising costs of living, education and health care. Yet many have started putting aside resources for retirement earlier compared with others in the region. More of us also have hospitalisation coverage compared with our neighbours, the survey found.

So perhaps we are just more realistic, whereas people in India and China, whom the AXA survey found to be least prepared for the future, are overly optimistic.

In fact, for about a dozen years now, it has been known among researchers that, contrary to popular assumption, people in most Asian cultures tend to demonstrate a markedly higher degree of over-confidence compared to people from Western cultures.

Psychologists postulate that this surprising finding may reflect the number of arguments people can typically muster when mulling difficult decisions. And this would be a mental habit fostered by our formal education above all.

Experts suggest that Western(ised) pedagogical methods which emphasise critical and analytical thinking lead people to 'recruit' more arguments. By contrast, schooling systems in Asia tend to emphasise direct instruction and rote learning instead.

People who recruit more pros and cons have more doubts to deal with. If so, this might explain the anomaly that, unlike most Asians, Singaporeans are less over-confident in that we have a thoroughly Westernised, English-medium school system like none other in Asia.

To test this hypothesis, Professor Li Shu, formerly of the business school at the Nanyang Technological University, compared undergraduates here with those in two Fujian universities. All the students were tested for over-confidence in making predictions and also on their capacity for critical and analytical thinking.

That many Chinese Singaporeans are of Fujian extraction made the groups well matched , down to even their family values, so their distinctly different schooling experiences made for a very salient factor as to how they thought through things differently.

Prof Li, now at the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, showed in his study, published in The Journal of Psychology in 2006, that Singaporeans are not as over-confident as the Chinese.

Other researchers have also shown that the degree of over-confidence among Singaporeans is more akin to that of Americans - which has been consistently shown to be lower than that of people in India, Taiwan and China.

Aside from the mode of schooling, perhaps the general culture also affects our confidence levels. So do Singaporean values render us a more cautious culture?

Though measuring something as slippery as values is fraught with difficulties, proverbs may arguably be proxy for longstanding cultural values that can affect our confidence, optimism and propensity for risk-taking.

Prof Li argued that Singapore 21 may be construed as a proverb, if only in an extended sense. (Launched in 1997, the Singapore 21 drive was encapsulated in the line 'Together we make the difference'.)

What Prof Li's research showed was that while Singapore 21 promotes collectivist attitudes, it also tempers over -confidence among young Singaporeans. If so, then the educational system may be working hand in glove with the general culture to render Singaporeans less over-confident than other Asians.

I don't know if this makes us gloomier or unhappier but it certainly makes us a more cautious people. And we probably need to be, for as Minister Mentor Lee Kuan Yew said recently: 'Singapore is a superstructure built on (but) 700 sq km and a lot of smart ideas (all of which) could come undone very quickly.'

At the very least, we do need to be more cautious than others in Asia.

andyho@sph.com.sg