Wishful thinking

Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence, rationality, or reality. It is a product of resolving conflicts between belief and desire. Studies have consistently shown that holding all else equal, subjects will predict positive outcomes to be more likely than negative outcomes (see unrealistic optimism). However, research suggests that under certain circumstances, such as when threat increases, a reverse phenomenon occurs.

Some psychologists believe that positive thinking is able to positively influence behavior and so bring about better results. This is called "Pygmalion effect".

Christopher Booker described wishful thinking in terms of

Prominent examples of wishful thinking include:

In addition to being a cognitive bias and a poor way of making decisions, wishful thinking is commonly held to be a specific informal fallacy in an argument when it is assumed that because we wish something to be true or false, it is actually true or false. This fallacy has the form "I wish that P is true/false, therefore P is true/false." Wishful thinking, if this were true, would rely upon appeals to emotion, and would also be a red herring.

Wishful thinking may cause blindness to unintended consequences.

Wishful seeing is the phenomenon in which a person's internal state influences their visual perception. People have the tendency to believe that they perceive the world for what it is, but research suggests otherwise. Currently, there are two main types of wishful seeing based on where wishful seeing occurs—in categorization of objects or in representations of an environment.

The concept of wishful seeing was first introduced by the New Look approach to psychology. The New Look approach was popularized in the 1950s through the work of Jerome Bruner and Cecile Goodman. In their classic 1947 study, they asked children to demonstrate their perception of the size of coins by manipulating the diameter of a circular aperture on a wooden box. Each child held the coin in their left hand at the same height and distance from the aperture and operated the knob to change the size of the aperture with their right hand. The children were divided into three groups, two experimental and one control, with ten children in each group. The control group was asked to estimate the size of coin-sized cardboard discs instead of actual coins. On average, the children of the experimental groups overestimated the size of the coins by thirty percent. In a second iteration of the experiment, Bruner and Goodman divided the children into groups based on economic status. Again, both the "poor" and "rich" groups were asked to estimate the size of real coins by manipulating the diameter of the aperture. As was expected, both groups overestimated the size of the coins, but the "poor" group overestimated the size by as much as fifty percent, which was up to thirty percent more than the "rich" group. From these results Bruner and Goodman concluded that poorer children felt a greater desire for money and thus perceived the coins as larger. This hypothesis formed the basis of the New Look psychological approach which suggests that the subjective experience of an object influences the visual perception of that object. Some psychodynamic psychologists adopted the views of the New Look approach in order to explain how individuals might protect themselves from disturbing visual stimuli. The psychodynamic perspective lost support because it lacked a sufficient model to account for how the unconscious could influence perception.

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