Wishful Thinking and Perception: I

Let's begin our exploration of wishful thinking at the beginning, where we take in information about the world. After we receive information from the world — from our environment and from the people in it — we process that information. We can regard the early stages of that process as intake, which includes choosing where to acquire data, actually acquiring it with our sensors (eyes, ears, touch, and so on), and processing that data in the sensors, in the brain, and in the connections between sensors and brain. Because the world is so complex, we must be selective, and we can't process all the data we acquire. So we do our best. The result is inevitably an incomplete representation of the world.

And that's where things begin to get interesting.

To reduce the volume of data, we take shortcuts that introduce systematic distortions and misrepresentations. Many of these shortcuts (but not all) are among what psychologists call cognitive biases. When we want the world to be a certain way, these shortcuts and biases help us see things that way. That's how they can contribute to wishful thinking.

Here are some of the known phenomena that contribute to wishful thinking by affecting the data we take in.

Confirmation bias

Our preconceptions and wishes can affect how we search for information, how we process it, and how we recall it. Our wishes can even affect what questions we ask. This phenomenon is known as confirmation bias.

Examine your research process. Did you search only for what you hoped you'd find? Or did you also ask the questions that a skeptic would have asked?

Attentional bias

The focus of our attention can be biased by what we've been attending to recently, by what we're familiar with, by what we like, or by what we understand most easily. Biased attention yields a distorted view of the overall situation.

To gain insight into what you might have overlooked, consider what you've been exploring recently, your likes, your familiarities, and what you find easy to understand. That's where your wishes are. Then look elsewhere. That's where you'll find what you wish wasn't so — or what never occurred to you at all.

Seeing patterns that aren't there

Some cognitive Biased attention yields
a distorted view of the
overall situationbiases result in noticing patterns that don't actually exist: among them are the clustering illusion, the hot hand fallacy, pareidolia, and apophenia [Brenner 2014]. When we have wishes to be fulfilled, we're more likely to see patterns that support those wishes.

Seeing false patterns is misleading enough, but when we use them to guide us in gathering more data, the false patterns can reinforce themselves, which can make them seem even more plausible. Did you use your observations of patterns to guide you in gathering further information? Did you first verify that the patterns you saw were real?

We'll continue next time with more sources of perceptual distortion that can lead to wishful thinking. First in this series | Next in this series  Top    Next Issue

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For more about apophenia, see "Apophenia at Work," Point Lookout for March 14, 2012, and "Cognitive Biases and Influence: II," Point Lookout for July 13, 2016.

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