Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs based on what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than on evidence, rationality, or reality. It is a product of resolving conflicts between belief and desire. Methodologies to examine wishful thinking are diverse. Various disciplines and schools of thought examine related mechanisms such as neural circuitry, human cognition and emotion, types of bias, procrastination, motivation, optimism, attention and environment. This concept has been examined as a fallacy. It is related to the concept of wishful seeing.
Some psychologists believe that positive thinking is able to positively influence behavior and so bring about better results. This is called the "Pygmalion effect". Studies have consistently shown that holding all else equal, subjects will have unrealistic optimism and predict positive outcomes to be more likely than negative outcomes. Research also suggests that under certain circumstances, such as when threat increases, a reverse phenomenon occurs.
As a fallacy 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 one wishes something to be true or false, it is actually true or false. This fallacy has the form "I wish that P were 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 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.
Although some further research was able to replicate the results found by Bruner and Goodman, the New Look approach was mostly abandoned by the 1970s because the experiments were riddled with methodological errors that did not account for confounding factors such as reporter bias and context. Recent research has brought about a revival of New Look perspectives, but with methodological improvements to resolve the outstanding issues that plagued the original studies.
Reverse wishful thinking and seeing This process occurs when threat increases. The Ebbinghaus illusion has been used to measure reverse wishful seeing, with participants observing negative flanker targets underestimated less than positive or neutral targets. Feelings of fear also lead to perception of the feared object as closer just as prior research suggests that desired objects are perceived as closer. Furthermore, some people are less inclined to wishful thinking/seeing based on their emotional states or personality.
Underlying mechanisms Cognition Concrete cognitive mechanisms underlying wishful thinking and wishful seeing are unknown. Since these concepts are still developing, research on the mechanisms contributing to this phenomenon is still in progress. However, some mechanisms have been proposed. Wishful thinking could be attributed to three mechanisms: attentional bias, interpretation bias or response bias. Therefore, there are three different stages in cognitive processing in which wishful thinking could arise. First, at the lowest stage of cognitive processing, individuals selectively attend to cues. Individuals can attend to evidence that supports their desires and neglect contradictory evidence. Second, wishful thinking could be generated by selective interpretation of cues. In this case, an individual is not changing their attention to the cue but the attribution of importance to the cue. Finally, wishful thinking can arise at a higher stage of cognitive processing, such as when forming a response to the cue and inserting bias.
Wishful seeing can be attributed to the same mechanisms as wishful thinking because it involves the processing of situational cues, including visual cues. However, with preconscious processing of visual cues and their associations with desirable outcomes, interpretation bias and response bias are not plausible since they occur in conscious cognitive processing stages. Therefore, a fourth mechanism called perceptual set can also explain this phenomenon. This mechanism proposes that mental states or associations activated before an object comes into view subtly guide the visual system during processing. Therefore, cues are readily recognized when they are related to such a mental state or association.
Some speculate that wishful seeing results from cognitive penetrability in that higher cognitive functions are able to directly influence perceptual experience instead of only influencing perception at higher levels of processing. Those that argue against cognitive penetrability feel that sensory systems operate in a modular fashion with cognitive states exerting their influence only after the stimuli has been perceived. The phenomenon of wishful seeing implicates cognitive penetrability in the perceptual experience.
Wishful seeing has been observed to occur in early stages of categorization. Research using ambiguous figures and binocular rivalry exhibit this tendency. Perception is influenced by both top-down and bottom-up processing. In visual processing, bottom-up processing is a rigid route compared to flexible top-down processing. Within bottom-up processing, the stimuli are recognized by fixation points, proximity and focal areas to build objects, while top-down processing is more context sensitive. This effect can be observed via priming as well as with emotional states. The traditional hierarchical models of information processing describe early visual processing as a one-way street: early visual processing goes into conceptual systems, but conceptual systems do not affect visual processes. Currently, research rejects this model and suggests conceptual information can penetrate early visual processing rather than just biasing the perceptual systems. This occurrence is called conceptual or cognitive penetrability. Research on conceptual penetrability utilize stimuli of conceptual-category pairs and measure the reaction time to determine if the category effect influenced visual processing, The category effect is the difference in reaction times within the pairs such as Bb to Bp. To test conceptual penetrability, there were simultaneous and sequential judgments of pairs. The reaction times decreased as the stimulus onset asynchrony increased, supporting categories affect visual representations and conceptual penetrability. Research with richer stimuli such as figures of cats and dogs allow for greater perceptual variability and analysis of stimulus typicality (cats and dogs were arranged in various positions, some more or less typical for recognition). Differentiating the pictures took longer when they were within the same category (doga-dogb) compared between categories (dog-cat) supporting category knowledge influences categorization. Therefore, visual processing measured by physical differential judgments is affected by non-visual processing supporting conceptual penetrability.
Neural circuitry The areas of the brain that motivate wishful seeing and thinking are associated with the same regions that underlie social identification and reward. A study looked at these structures using MRI while participants estimated the winning probabilities for a series of football teams. Prior to this estimation, the individuals specified their favorite, neutral and least favorite NFL teams. Wishful thinking has been associated with social identity theory where individuals seem to prefer in-group members over out-group members. In this case, these individuals preferred the football team they most identified.
During wishful thinking tasks, differential activity was found in three areas of the brain: dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, the parietal lobe, and the fusiform gyrus in the occipital lobe. Differential activity in the occipital and parietal areas suggests a mode of selective attention to the cues presented; therefore, supporting a lower-level cognitive processing or attention bias. However, differential activity in the prefrontal cortex also suggests higher-cognitive processing. The prefrontal cortex activity is related to preferences involved in social identification. As a result, when cues are relevant to an individual, such as a favorite football team, the prefrontal cortex is activated. This identification of self carries hedonic value which in turn stimulates the reward system. Differential activation of the reward system areas was only seen in conjunction with the activation of occipital lobe. Thus, the activation of the reward system with an identification of self could lead to guidance of visual attention.