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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 ...
This kind of appeal to emotion is irrelevant to or distracting from the facts of the argument (a so-called "red herring") and encompasses several logical fallacies, including appeal to consequences, appeal to fear, appeal to flattery, appeal to pity, appeal to ridicule, appeal to spite, and wishful thinking.
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.
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The titles of some books are self-explanatory. Good books on critical thinking commonly contain sections on fallacies, and some may be listed below. DiCarlo, Christopher (2011). How to Become a Really Good Pain in the Ass: A Critical Thinker's Guide to Asking the Right Questions. Prometheus Books. ISBN 9781616143978. Engel, S. Morris (1994).
Britain’s armed forces chief has dismissed speculation that Russian President Vladimir Putin is “not well” or could be assassinated as “wishful thinking”.
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 ...