Wishful thinking
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Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs and making decisions according to what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence or rationality.
Studies have consistently shown that holding all else equal, subjects will predict positive outcomes to be more likely than negative outcomes. See positive outcome bias.
Prominent examples of wishful thinking include:
- Economist Irving Fisher said that "stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau" a few weeks before Stock Market Crash of 1929, which was followed by the Great Depression.
- President John F. Kennedy believed that, if overpowered by Cuban forces, the CIA-backed rebels could "escape destruction by melting into the countryside" in the Bay of Pigs Invasion.
Wishful thinking in reverse, or Reverse wishful thinking
Reverse wishful thinking, or wishful thinking in reverse, can be said to occur in a person’s mind when, as a stern, relentless and usually pompous follower of a rational notion, he/she expects it to always be valid regardless of, and/or in spite of either not taking into full account all imponderables or, most common and notably, the lack of up-to-the minute research on the subject, thereby resulting in his/her wrongly assuming that decisions, recommendations and, especially, forecasts derived from that notion can only be the result of either factual evidence, or rationality as known to that person at a particular point in time, all of which invariably taking place before all the said imponderables, and up to the minute, yet public evidence are taken into full account.
- Example:
“That house, at this particular point in time, is not an option for me to purchase, least of all as an investment, not just because I don’t like the house, or hate the neighborhood, but because I’ve studied the local market for the past two years or so. On top of that, the price they are asking, albeit within my reach, is not worth all the hassle involved ”
A supposedly rational decision, based on logic, and sound evidence available to a particular person, but made obsolete over the immediate, medium and long term as a result of the person’s not being aware that, a couple of days earlier, a highly publicized announcement had been made, in that person’s community, of a large investment to be undertaken by a giant multinational corporation in that particular neighborhood and which included a note on their willingness to pay whatever cost to home owners over the next year or so, their intention being to build a huge mall on the site.
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[edit] As a logical fallacy
In addition to being a cognitive bias and a poor way of making decisions, wishful thinking is commonly held to be a specific logical fallacy in an argument when it is assumed that because we wish something to be true or false that it is actually true or false. This fallacy has the form "I wish that P is true/false, therefore P is true/false."[1] Wishful thinking, if this were true, would underlie appeals to emotion, and would also be a red herring.
The charge of "wishful thinking" itself can be a form of circumstantial ad hominem argument, even a Bulverism.
Wishful thinking may cause blindness to unintended consequences.
Related fallacies are the Negative proof and Argument from ignorance fallacies ("It hasn't been proven false, so it must be true." and vice versa). For instance, a believer in UFOs may accept that most UFO photos are faked, but claim that the ones that haven't been debunked must be considered genuine.
