Wishful Thinking about the Future: Does Desire Impact Optimism?

The notion that desire for an outcome inflates optimism about that outcome has been dubbed the desirability bias or wishful thinking. In this paper, we discuss the importance of distinguishing wishful thinking from the more general concept of motivated reasoning, and we explain why documenting overoptimism or correlations between preferences and optimism is not sufficient to infer a desirability bias. Then, we discuss results from a review and meta-analysis of the experimental literature on wishful thinking. These findings, in conjunction with more recent work, not only highlight important moderators and mediators of the desirability bias but also point out limitations of the empirical research on the bias. These results also reveal an important difference between how likelihood judgments and discrete outcome predictions respond to desirability of outcomes. We conclude by presenting avenues for future research useful for understanding wishful thinking’s manifestation in everyday environments and its integration with related phenomena. —A soon-to-be bride and groom who hope the weather will cooperate on their wedding day. —An Illinois grade-schooler who thinks it would be ‘pretty cool’ if Chicago was indeed selected as the host city for the 2016 Olympics. —An office worker who, with a Duke Blue Devils victory, could win the distinction and money for having the best set of NCAA Tournament predictions. —A Democrat from Texas hoping the news from the swing states does not disappoint. Will the fact that these people strongly desire a particular outcome inflate their optimism about that outcome? The notion that such desires have a causal impact on optimism has been dubbed the desirability bias and is sometimes referred to as wishful thinking. To most people, wishful thinking might be a truism. George Orwell (1945) wrote that ‘people can foresee the future only when it coincides with their own wishes’, and perusal of New York Times archives over the last few years revealed many uses of the term, from apparent wishful whims about topics from sports