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In addition to being a cognitive bias and a poor way of making decisions, wishful thinking is commonly held to be a specific informal fallacy in an argument when it is assumed that because we wish something to be true or false, it is actually true or false. This fallacy has the form "I wish that P were true/false; therefore, P is true/false."
G. I. Joe fallacy, the tendency to think that knowing about cognitive bias is enough to overcome it. [65] Gambler's fallacy, the tendency to think that future probabilities are altered by past events, when in reality they are unchanged. The fallacy arises from an erroneous conceptualization of the law of large numbers. For example, "I've ...
Wishful-thinking effects, in which people overestimate the likelihood of an event because of its desirability, are relatively rare. [10] This may be in part because people engage in more defensive pessimism in advance of important outcomes, [ 11 ] in an attempt to reduce the disappointment that follows overly optimistic predictions.
Later work re-interpreted these results as a tendency to test ideas in a one-sided way, focusing on one possibility and ignoring alternatives. Explanations for the observed biases include wishful thinking and the limited human capacity to process information. Another proposal is that people show confirmation bias because they are pragmatically ...
The power of emotions to influence judgment, including political attitudes, has been recognized since classical antiquity. Aristotle, in his treatise Rhetoric, described emotional arousal as critical to persuasion, "The orator persuades by means of his hearers, when they are roused to emotion by his speech; for the judgments we deliver are not the same when we are influenced by joy or sorrow ...
Furthermore, Kaplan et al. state, that specific type of self-serving bias is wishful thinking. This is typically present, when unpleasant surprise pops up in the negotiation, particularly when the opponent has made preparations carefully. Another example is well-known phenomenon from law-court and is commonly used also in law-based TV-series.
Britain’s armed forces chief has dismissed speculation that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “not well” or could be assassinated as “wishful thinking”.
Irving Langmuir coined the phrase pathological science in a talk in 1953.. Pathological science, as defined by Langmuir, is a psychological process in which a scientist, originally conforming to the scientific method, unconsciously veers from that method, and begins a pathological process of wishful data interpretation (see the observer-expectancy effect and cognitive bias).