Summary: 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.

Studies have consistently shown that holding all else equal, subjects will predict positive outcomes to be more likely than negative outcomes. See Positive outcome bias.

Prominent examples of wishful thinking include:

Economist Irving Fisher said that “stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau” a few weeks before the Stock Market Crash of 1929, which was followed by the Great Depression.

President John F. Kennedy believed that, if overpowered by Cuban forces, the CIA-backed rebels could “escape destruction by melting into the countryside” in the Bay of Pigs Invasion.

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Wishful thinking impairs belief-desire reasoning: a case of decoupling failure in adults?

Subjects were presented with a scenario that described how a certain type of opinion poll can be manipulated by respondents to put one particular political party (the threatened party) at a disadvantage. In a first experiment, people supporting this party but pretending to oppose it were found to be as likely to say that they would manipulate the poll as people who actually opposed it. In a second experiment, the threat embodied in the scenario was made more direct. It was also more salient because the study was carried out at a time of heightened political awareness when supporters of the threatened party were genuinely concerned about its future. People supporting the threatened party but pretending to oppose it were now about half as likely to say that they would manipulate the poll as those who actually opposed it. Two explanations for this breakdown in the belief-desire reasoning subserving pretense are considered.

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