The ability of people to anticipate the future with some substantial degree of accuracy is critical for everyday functioning as well as survival. Consider an adolescent anticipating the consequences of smoking, an entrepreneur anticipating the success of a new business, or a commander anticipating the outcome of a battle. In these cases, inaccuracies in assessing the future--such as being overoptimistic about a preferred outcome--can have negative or even tragic consequences. This project investigates the impact people''s preferences regarding an outcome (e.g., hoping a new business will succeed) have on the subjective likelihood of that outcome. This potential impact is called the desirability bias. One possible influence of outcome preferences is described by the popularly discussed notion of wishful thinking, which suggests that desire for an outcome can inflate people''s optimism about that outcome. However, an alternative possibility for the influence of preferences is also quite plausible. Namely, people might become overly pessimistic about the likelihood of a preferred outcome, perhaps because they want to avoid the extra disappointment or other hardships that occur when a negative outcome is unexpected rather than expected. This project investigates both the positive and negative sides of the desirability bias. Broadly stated, this project investigates whether, when, and how outcome preferences cause over-optimism and/or over-pessimism.
Most previous research investigating desirability biases has focused on people''s discrete outcome predictions about events that are randomly determined. The experiments in this project focus on non-random outcomes and were designed from an information-processing perspective. The experiments test possible mechanistic accounts of desirability effects, particularly the enhanced-focalism and confirmation-bias accounts. Special attention is paid to understanding individual differences in desirability effects. Not only will the findings help theory development within psychology, but they will also have potential applications for predicting people''s health behavior, investment decisions, and voting behavior.
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