Wishful Thinking

A tendency to overestimate one's chances of success or the likelihood of a desirable outcome, or to believe that something – a claim, hypothesis, etc. – is true because one wants it to be true in contrast to believing on the basis of a rational evaluation of evidence.

For example:

A bettor “plunges big” on the Lotto thinking he or she really stands a good chance on this ‘play’.

A researcher is pleased to find that certain observations in a study accord with what he or she had hoped to see (especially before the “double-blind” era).

A smoker disregards or downplays ill effects which have been linked with cigarette and cigar smoking.

A resident of an area of (geologically-recent) past earthquake activity takes comfort in the belief that, in the ‘unlikely’ event that a ‘quake hits, it won’t happen right where they live.

Seemingly paradoxically, there is a tendency in the case of more extreme risks connected with some course-of-action that potential unfavourable consequences are minimized in the mind of a decision-maker (“biased discounting”) so that the probability of such consequences occurring is discounted or underestimated, and the probability of a desirable outcome is assessed too highly (“wishful thinking”). A failure to look for contrary evidence and an overabundance of confidence in the quality of the decision made are likely to be associated with such thinking.

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