Most important decisions involve making predictions about the future. The decision whether or not to buy a particular house, for example, might involve predicting changes in the size of one's family, the composition of the prospective neighborhood, and one's future employment and income. The same is true of most other important personal decisions and also professional decisions in fields like medicine, law, business, and public policy. The question addressed by this research is whether these kinds of predictions are influenced by "wishful thinking." Are people's predictions about what will happen in the future influenced by what they want to happen? For example, does the fact that a couple wants a particular house--and therefore wants to be able to make the payments--cause them to make overly optimistic predictions about their future employment and income? This is clearly an important question because this kind of wishful thinking could lead to poor decisions. For example, it could cause the aforementioned couple to fail to anticipate a job layoff that results in foreclosure on their mortgage.
The results of past research on wishful thinking are inconsistent, with some researchers finding strong effects of people's desires on their predictions and others finding weak or null effects. The goal of the present research is test a newly developed framework for integrating these inconsistent results. This framework specifies six conditions under which wishful thinking is especially likely to occur. A review of the literature suggests that these conditions were largely met in previous studies that demonstrated wishful thinking, but not in research that failed to demonstrate it. The six conditions are 1) the desire that the event occur is strong, 2) whether or not the event is going to occur is highly uncertain, 3) there is no strong incentive for the prediction to be accurate, 4) the prediction task is complex, requiring the search for and integration of many pieces of information, 5) the event is perceived as being at least partly under the control of the person making the prediction, and 6) the prediction takes a deterministic "yes-no" form rather than a probabilistic form. The research will consist of several experiments in which college students and others make predictions about a broad range of future events including sporting contests, political elections, and games of chance like roulette. By manipulating both the desirability of the alternative outcomes of these events and whether or not each of the six conditions of the framework are met, it will be determined whether wishful thinking is in fact more likely when those conditions are satisfied. As a result of this research, scientific understanding of wishful thinking, its causes, and the conditions under which it is most likely to occur will be greatly expanded. This will allow researchers to develop methods for avoiding wishful thinking to help people make better decisions.
