AUTOMATIC OPTIMISM: THE ROLE OF DESIRE IN JUDGMENTS ABOUT THE LIKELIHOOD OF FUTURE EVENTS
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The tendency to believe that the future will be consistent with desires is perhaps the best documented bias that influences human thought. Despite decades of research on this desirability bias, very few studies have addressed what is meant by desire or how desires influence judgments about the future. The goal of this chapter is to provide a novel theoretical framework from which to understand why and when people are optimistic about the future and to report results from three studies that examined whether the desirability of future events changes how people evaluate objective probabilities about the likelihood of those events. Two studies examined the influence of desire on the use of probabilistic The tendency to believe that the future will be consistent with desires is perhaps the best documented bias that influences human thought. Despite decades of research on this desirability bias, very few studies have addressed what is meant by desire or how desires influence judgments about the future. The goal of this chapter is to provide a novel theoretical framework from which to understand why and when people are optimistic about the future and to report results from three studies that examined whether the desirability of future events changes how people evaluate objective probabilities about the likelihood of those events. Two studies examined the influence of desire on the use of probabilistic information in judgments about the likelihood of future life events (such as winning awards, developing cancer) and judgments about chance events (winning a game, losing a game). A third study explored whether people use probabilistic information differently when they make judgments about their own future versus the futures of others. Consistent with predictions based on a dual process framework, people judged that positive events were more likely to occur than negative events with the exact same objective probability of occurrence and they interpreted probabilistic information more loosely when they made judgments about their own futures versus the futures of others. These findings suggest that people take remarkable liberties with supposedly objective information in order to judge that their own future will be ideal."What a man believes upon grossly insufficient evidence is an index into his desires - desires of which he himself is often unconscious. If a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way." 2010 Nova Science Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved.
