Abstract
Bayesian principles show up across many domains of human cognition, but wishful thinking—where beliefs are updated in the direction of desired outcomes rather than what the evidence implies—seems to threaten the universality of Bayesian approaches to the mind. In this Article, we show that Bayesian optimality and wishful thinking are, despite first appearances, compatible. The setting of opposing goals can cause two groups of people with identical prior beliefs to reach opposite conclusions about the same evidence through fully Bayesian calculations. We show that this is possible because, when people set goals, they receive privileged information in the form of affective experiences, and this information systematically supports goal-consistent conclusions. We ground this idea in a formal, Bayesian model in which affective prediction errors drive wishful thinking. We obtain empirical support for our model across five studies.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available at https://osf.io/59dmr/?view_only=b8ea1a66b5e84d1e8d67391662b60d82.
Code availability
The custom code that supports the findings of this study is available at https://osf.io/59dmr/?view_only=b8ea1a66b5e84d1e8d67391662b60d82.
Change history
02 April 2024
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01873-0
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Acknowledgements
D.E.M. was supported by the Stanford Graduate School of Business. N.S. was supported by the Wolpow Family Faculty Scholar Fund, the Wharton Dean’s Research Fund and the Wharton Behavioral Lab. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.
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D.E.M. and N.S. jointly designed the studies, analysed the data and wrote the paper. D.E.M. is responsible for the formal model; in an equally weighty intellectual achievement, N.S. is responsible for typesetting that model in LaTeX.
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Melnikoff, D.E., Strohminger, N. Bayesianism and wishful thinking are compatible. Nat Hum Behav 8, 692–701 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01819-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01819-6
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