While the science and values literature has seen recurrent concerns about wishful thinking, there have been few efforts to characterize this phenomenon. Based on a review of varieties of wishful thinking involved in climate skepticism, we argue that instances of wishful thinking can be fruitfully characterized in terms of the mechanisms that generate them and the problems associated with them. ...

Title of Document: MEASURING WISHFUL THINKING: THE DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF A NEW SCALE Angela H. Eichelberger, Ph.D., 2007 Directed by: Professor Harold Sigall, Department of Psychology This dissertation describes the development and validation of a 10-item scale measuring individual differences in wishful thinking, or the degree to which individuals’ desires bias their judgments. A study...

P research provides only weak and controversial evidence that people overestimate the likelihood of desirable events (wishful thinking), but strong evidence that people bet more heavily on those events (wishful betting). Two experiments show that wishful betting contaminates beliefs in laboratory financial markets because wishful betters appear to possess more favorable information than they ac...

and we will write to you when there is a bed available yes I know it's painful, and six months is a long time to wait, but I am afraid we have already lost two wards this year because of the cuts. Mrs Thatcher keeps taking money away from us to spend on Trident Missiles Yes I wish you would write to your Member of Parliament about it. Hello Sister, is it tea time yet? Sister: Not yet I'm afraid...

Towards developing a theory of systematic biases about strategies, I analyze strategic implications of a particular bias: wishful thinking about the strategies. Considering canonical state spaces for strategic uncertainty, I identify a player as a wishful thinker at a state if she hopes to enjoy the highest payoff that is consistent with her information about the others’ strategies at that stat...

Creating agents that act reasonably in uncertain environments is a primary goal of agent-based research. In this work we explore the theory that wishful thinking can be an effective strategy in uncertain and competitive decision scenarios. Specifically, we present the constraints necessary for wishful thinking to outperform Expected Utility Maximization and take instances of popular games from ...

When making source attributions, people tend to attribute desirable statements to reliable sources and undesirable statements to unreliable sources, a phenomenon known as the wishful thinking effect (Gordon, Franklin, & Beck, 2005). In the present study, we examined the influence of wishful thinking on source monitoring for self-relevant information. On one hand, wishful thinking is expected, b...