Wishful thinking
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.
[2][3] Christopher Booker discussed wishful thinking in terms of "the fantasy cycle", which he described as "a pattern that recurs in personal lives, in politics, in history – and in storytelling."
But because this make-believe can never be reconciled with reality, it leads to a 'frustration stage' as things start to go wrong, prompting a more determined effort to keep the fantasy in being.
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.
From these results Bruner and Goodman concluded that poorer children felt a greater desire for money and thus perceived the coins as larger.
[9] Some psychodynamic psychologists adopted the views of the New Look approach in order to explain how individuals might protect themselves from disturbing visual stimuli.
[10] 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.
[11] 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.
[14] Finally, wishful thinking can arise at a higher stage of cognitive processing, such as when forming a response to the cue and inserting bias.
[5] This mechanism proposes that mental states or associations activated before an object comes into view subtly guide the visual system during processing.
[19] Currently, research rejects this model and suggests conceptual information can penetrate early visual processing rather than just biasing the perceptual systems.
The reaction times decreased as the stimulus onset asynchrony increased, supporting categories affect visual representations and conceptual penetrability.
[15][20] Magnocellular (M) and parvocellular (P) pathways, which feed into the orbitofrontal cortex, play important roles in top-down processes that are susceptible to cognitive penetrability.
[18] Magnocellular processing biased stimuli deferentially activates the orbitofrontal cortex; fast magnocellular projections link early visual and inferotemporal object recognition and work with the orbitofrontal cortex by helping generate early object predictions based on perceptual sets.
[19] Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to monitor brain activity in the orbitofrontal cortex and ventrotemporal regions to determine which pathway aided faster object recognition.
[24] This study suggests attention bias, a mechanism of wishful thinking, does not only rely on what individuals fixate upon, but the unattended stimuli as well.
[25][26] Cross-cultural differences in change blindness have been associated with perceptual set, or a tendency to attend to visual scenes in a particular way.
The active brain regions, compared to a fixation point, were the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (rACC) and the right amygdala.
It is suggested that the rACC regulates activation in brain regions associated with emotion and autobiographical memory, thus allowing for the projection of positivity onto images of future events.
Balcetis and Dunning (2013) investigated wishful seeing by conducting two experiments, one involving two ambiguous stimuli that could be perceived as "B" or "13", and the other either a horse or a seal.
[5] This strong correlation between perception and positive versus negative stimuli demonstrates that we tend to see the world based on our own desires.
The participants were then shown an ambiguous Necker cube on a computer screen and were told to click one of the two blue lines that seemed the closest to them.
[31] The study concludes that an alteration of a biological state, in this case the participants' level of thirstiness, that inspires wishful thinking, can directly affect the perception of visual stimuli.
In one study, participants had their thirst intensified by consuming a large portion of their daily sodium intake or quenched by drinking to satiety.
[10] Another study performed by Balcetis and Dunning had participants estimate the distance to test results that contained either positive or negative feedback and to $100 gift cards that they had the possibility of either winning or not.
[10] Balcetis and Dunning took into account the possible influence of positive mood by measuring creativity through a word creation task, and arousal by physiological markers.
[10] The experimenters also eliminated reporter bias in one of their studies by having participants throw a beanbag toward a gift card adhered to the floor.
[5] Many studies have supported that desire or motivations affect estimates of size, distance, speed, length and slope of environments or targets.
"[35] In other words, perceived increase in effort (a steeper slope) when physically exhausted, might prompt individuals to rest rather than expend more energy.
[36] Sigall, Kruglanski, and Fyock (2000) found that people who were assessed to be high wishful thinkers were more likely to procrastinate when motivated to do so (by being told that the task they were about to do was unpleasant).
