- Wishful thinking
This first cognitive biais is the Wishful thinking, described by Christopher Booker as
“… a paradigm that recurs in personal lives, in politics, in history - and in storytelling. When we embark on a course of action which is unconsciously driver by wishful thinking, all may seem to go well for time, in what may be called the “dream stage”. But because this make-believe can never be reconciled with reality, it leads to a “frustration stage” as things start to go wrong, prompting a more determined effort to keep the fantasy in being. As reality presses, in leads to as “nightmare stage” as everything goes wrong, culminating in an “explosion into reality”, when the fantasy finally falls apart.”
who was born 7 October 1937. Christophe Booker is known as an author and journalist having operated in many different concerns as global warning or publication. So, wishful thinking is the big picture, this cognitive biais is beliefs and decision making on the purpose of what might be pleasing to imagine instead of by appealing to evidence, or rationality.
But particular phenomenon have been named “Wishful seeing” based on Cecile Goodman and Jerome Bruner in 1947, as a tendency for individuals to let their internal state influences their visual perceptions. Introduced in 1947 by Cecile Goodman & Jerome Bruner, they asked children
(experimentation protocols below are Wikipedia contents)
“ to demonstrate their perception of the size of coins by manipulating the diameter of a circular aperture on a wooden box. Each child held the coin in their left hand at the same height and distance from the aperture and operated the knob to change the size of the aperture with their right hand.
The children were divided into three groups, two experimental and one control, with ten children in each group. The control group was asked to estimate the size of coin-sized cardboard discs instead of actual coins. On average, the children of the experimental groups overestimated the size of the coins by thirty percent. In a second iteration of the experiment, Bruner and Goodman divided the children into groups based on economic status. Again, both the "poor" and "rich" groups were asked to estimate the size of real coins by manipulating the diameter of the aperture.
As was expected, both groups overestimated the size of the coins, but the "poor" group overestimated the size by as much as fifty percent, which was up to thirty percent more than the "rich" group.” Cecile Goodman and Jerome Bruner concluded that poorer children felt a greater desire for money and thus perceived the coin as larger. The “New look” approach which based on those studies suggests that the subjective experience of an object influences the visual perception of that object.
Those conclusions are partly wrong because of some methodological errors as confounding factors (biais and contexte for exemple). In fact, if beliefs and stats of mind can induct perceptions, and the perception type studied here is a physical one, but what about social beliefs representation type of perception (w’ll get it someday).
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My asking now is about how should we consider this particular acting of unrealistic optimism, risking more and more, but finally sadly confronts reality.
Oh wait, ins’t HOPE? If some philosophical peoples are around there, do not hesitate to comment, I don’t know anything about philosophy (it’s in progress!), but i’ll be glad to discover it by talking with you.
See you on the next one, regards
Trunks
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wishful_thinking#Further_reading
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Booker#Career
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerome_Bruner
