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Bayesianism and wishful thinking are compatible

Nature Human Behaviour volume 8, pages 692–701 (2024)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 02 April 2024

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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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Fig. 1: Predicted versus observed affect as a function of case and whether participants were incentivized to defend the plaintiff’s position (pro-plaintiff) or the defendant’s position (pro-defendant) in study 1.
Fig. 2: The results of studies 2 and 3.
Fig. 3: The results of study 4.

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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.

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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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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    David E. Melnikoff

  2. Department of Legal Studies and Business Ethics, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Nina Strohminger

  3. Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Nina Strohminger

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  1. David E. Melnikoff
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  2. Nina Strohminger
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Contributions

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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Correspondence to David E. Melnikoff.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Adam Bear, Mike Oaksford and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

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Supplementary Methods, Results, Figs. 1 and 2 and References.

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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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