thumb|alt=Cartoon of a child sitting in a cart hitched to a much smaller toy horse, as if expecting the horse to pull her along|Illustration from [[St. Nicholas (magazine)|St. Nicholas: an Illustrated Magazine for Young Folks (1884) of a child imagining that a small, toy horse might pull his cart]]
Wishful thinking is the formation of beliefs based on what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than on evidence, rationality, or reality. It is a product of resolving conflicts between belief and desire. Methodologies to examine wishful thinking are diverse. Various disciplines and schools of thought examine related mechanisms such as neural circuitry, human cognition and emotion, types of bias, procrastination, motivation, optimism, attention and environment. This concept has been examined as a fallacy. It is related to the concept of wishful seeing.
Some psychologists believe that positive thinking is able to positively influence behavior and so bring about better results. This is called the "Pygmalion effect". Studies have consistently shown that holding all else equal, subjects will have unrealistic optimism and predict positive outcomes to be more likely than negative outcomes. Research also suggests that under certain circumstances, such as when threat increases, a reverse phenomenon occurs.
As a fallacy
In addition to being a cognitive bias and a poor way of making decisions, wishful thinking is commonly held to be a specific informal fallacy in an argument when it is assumed that, because one wishes something to be true or false, it is actually true or false. This fallacy has the form "I wish that P were true/false; therefore, P is true/false." Wishful thinking, if this were true, would rely upon appeals to emotion, and would also be a red herring.
Wishful thinking may cause blindness to unintended consequences.
Wishful seeing
Wishful seeing is the phenomenon in which a person's internal state influences their visual perception. People have the tendency to believe that they perceive the world for what it is, but research suggests otherwise. Currently, there are two main types of wishful seeing based on where wishful seeing occurs—in categorization of objects or in representations of an environment. Some psychodynamic psychologists adopted the views of the New Look approach in order to explain how individuals might protect themselves from disturbing visual stimuli. The psychodynamic perspective lost support because it lacked a sufficient model to account for how the unconscious could influence perception.
Although some further research was able to replicate the results found by Bruner and Goodman, the New Look approach was mostly abandoned by the 1970s because the experiments were riddled with methodological errors that did not account for confounding factors such as reporter bias and context. Recent research has brought about a revival of New Look perspectives, but with methodological improvements to resolve the outstanding issues that plagued the original studies. Feelings of fear also lead to perception of the feared object as closer just as prior research suggests that desired objects are perceived as closer.
Furthermore, some people are less inclined to wishful thinking/seeing based on their emotional states or personality. First, at the lowest stage of cognitive processing, individuals selectively attend to cues. Individuals can attend to evidence that supports their desires and neglect contradictory evidence. Therefore, a fourth mechanism called perceptual set can also explain this phenomenon. Perception is influenced by both top-down and bottom-up processing. In visual processing, bottom-up processing is a rigid route compared to flexible top-down processing. Within bottom-up processing, the stimuli are recognized by fixation points, proximity and focal areas to build objects, while top-down processing is more context sensitive. This effect can be observed via priming as well as with emotional states. The traditional hierarchical models of information processing describe early visual processing as a one-way street: early visual processing goes into conceptual systems, but conceptual systems do not affect visual processes. Currently, research rejects this model and suggests conceptual information can penetrate early visual processing rather than just biasing the perceptual systems. This occurrence is called conceptual or cognitive penetrability. Research on conceptual penetrability utilize stimuli of conceptual-category pairs and measure the reaction time to determine if the category effect influenced visual processing, In this case, these individuals preferred the football team they most identified.
During wishful thinking tasks, differential activity was found in three areas of the brain: dorsal medial prefrontal cortex, the parietal lobe, and the fusiform gyrus in the occipital lobe. Differential activity in the occipital and parietal areas suggests a mode of selective attention to the cues presented; therefore, supporting a lower-level cognitive processing or attention bias.
Attentional deficits can also lead to altered perceptual experiences. Inattentional blindness, where unexpected events go by undetected, is one such deficit. Using an inattentional blindness paradigm, researchers, White and Davies, had participants fixate on a cross in the center of the screen. First, a number cue denoting the number of letters that would appear on the arms of the cross appeared in the center of the cross. Following the cue, the actual letters would appear on the arms of the cross. Over four trials, the number of letters matched the number that was cued. On the fifth trial, half of the participants were cued to expect a smaller number of letters and half were cued to expect the correct number of letters. The letters then appeared on the screen accompanied by an unexpected stimulus. Participants were asked which letters appeared and whether they had seen any additional object. Participants cued to expect fewer letters were more susceptible to inattentional blindness as they failed to detect the unexpected stimulus more often than participants who had been cued to expect the correct number of stimuli. These results indicate that attentional capacity is affected by expectations. This provides further evidence that cognitive processes converge in order to help construct the perceptual experience.
Although attention can lead to enhanced perceptual processing, the lack of attention to stimuli can also lead to a perceived enhanced perception of the stimuli. Participants were pre-cued that indicated the diagonal to which they should be attending. They were then presented with stimuli (gratings with different textures) and then a response cue that indicated the diagonal for which the participants had to judge their perception. 70% of the time the response cue matched the pre-cue and 30% of the time did not match the pre-cue. The participants were asked to report the texture of the gratings that appeared in the response-cue and discriminate its visibility. This set-up allowed them to compare the perception of attended (cued) and non-attended stimuli (uncued). However, context and cultural backgrounds have been shown to influence the visual perception and interpretation of emotion. Cross-cultural differences in change blindness have been associated with perceptual set, or a tendency to attend to visual scenes in a particular way. For example, eastern cultures tend to emphasize the background of an object, while western cultures focus on the central objects in a scene. Perceptual sets are also the result of cultural aesthetic preferences. Therefore, cultural context can influence how people sample information from a face, just like they would do in a situational context. For example, Caucasians generally fixate around eyes, nose and mouth, while Asians fixate on eyes.
It is important to consider physical aspects such as eye movement and brain activity and their relationship to wishful thinking, wishful seeing, and optimism. Isaacowitz (2006) investigated the motivational role of gaze, which he claims is highly correlated to an individual's interests and personality. In his study, participants who embodied varying levels of self-reported optimism were directed to look at images of skin cancer, line drawings that were similar to the cancer pictures, and neutral faces. The results of the study demonstrated that the majority of participants in the upward-looking condition saw the cube as facing upwards, the majority of downwards-looking conditioned patients saw the cube as facing downwards, and the participants in the neutral condition were evenly divided. The results of the study showed a clear tendency for the thirsty participants (who were directed to eat a bag of potato chips immediately preceding the study) to interpret the ambiguous stimuli as transparent. Psychosocial resources are defined by the Resources and Perception Model (RPM) as social support, self-worth, self- esteem, self-efficacy, hope, optimism, perceived control and self-disclosure. The participants reported distance measures while the experimenters manipulated the self-worth of the participants through mental imagery exercises, as well as their exposure to threatening (a tarantula) or non-threatening (a cat toy) stimuli. An effect of self-worth was only observed upon exposure to the threatening stimuli, when increased self-worth was correlated with a more realistic estimate of the distance to the threatening stimuli. For example, softball players who see the ball as bigger, hit better; tennis players who return better, see the net as lower and the ball as moving slower. In other words, perceived increase in effort (a steeper slope) when physically exhausted, might prompt individuals to rest rather than expend more energy.
Distance perception is also affected by cognitive dissonance. Similar results followed with a perception of slope test, in which participants were in high and low choice groups to push themselves up a slope on skateboard with only their arms. Again, the high choice group perceived the slope as shallower than the low choice in order to reduce cognitive dissonance. Both of these studies suggest that intrapsychic motives play a role in perception of environments in order to encourage the perceiver to engage in behaviors that lead them either to acquire a desired object or be able to complete a desired task.