How can scientists be influenced by wishful thinking

Any number of incorrect assumptions could lead to the results. Perhaps people think that everyone wishfully thinks, but only they are clever enough to correct for it. Further study is necessary to determine the cause of the over attribution. It would be important to do so if they think that his desires have a direct influence on his beliefs. Consider a learner using an oToM to reason about her uncle, a Chicago Cubs fan, who proudly proclaims that this is the year the Cubs will win it all.

Though her uncle knows a lot about baseball, the oToM learner is unmoved from her understandably skeptical stance. However, if her aunt, a lifelong Chicago White Sox fan hometown rival to the Cubs , agrees that the Cubs do look better than the Sox this year, then an oToM learner considers this a much stronger teaching signal. Experiment 2 data. Points represent the mean p team x response after hearing equally knowledgeable sources place a bet on team x that is either consistent, unrelated, or inconsistent with their desires.

We investigated which ToM best describes learning from social sources in a controlled version of this biased opinion scenario.

Participants were asked how likely a team x was to win an upcoming match, p team x , in a fictional college soccer tournament after seeing a knowledgeable student bet on the team.

The student was either a fan of one of the teams facing off, or indifferent to the outcome. One hundred twenty participants were randomly assigned into the consistent, inconsistent, or impartial conditions. The students were equally knowledgeable across conditions, being described as seeing the outcome of the last 10 matches these teams played against each other.

After the introduction, participants were given a test trial appropriate for their randomly assigned condition in which the student bet consistently with his school, bet against his school, or was impartial not a fan of either school. As predicted by the model of the oToM learner, someone who bets against their desires is more diagnostic of team x being dominant than the independent source.

The oToM learner thinks that team x had to be clearly dominant to overcome the wishful thinking of a fan rooting against them. For an rToM learner, the fan would have to have seen team x win a majority of the 10 observed matches in order to bet on them, regardless of their predilections, resulting in the flat predictions seen in Figure 4c. Meanwhile, the oToM learner thinks that a fan of team x could bet on them even if the fan only observed them win a few times.

Current computational models of theory of mind are built upon the assumption that beliefs are a priori independent of desires. Whether social reasoners use such a rational ToM rToM is an empirical question. In two experiments we tested the independence of beliefs and desires in ToM and found that people behave as if they think that others are wishful thinkers whose beliefs are colored by their desires.

In the 3-PoV condition of Experiment 1, we found that people believe that others inflate the probability of desirable outcomes and underestimate the probability of undesirable ones, as they would if they have an optimistic ToM oToM with a direct link between desires and beliefs Figure 3.

If people broadly attribute wishful thinking to others as Experiment 1 suggests , it should be reflected in their social reasoning. Agents whose beliefs ran against their desires were more influential than impartial agents, who, in turn, were more influential than agents with consistent beliefs and desires. They over attribute wishful thinking to others in situations where they would actually form their beliefs independently of their desires.

Charting the situations where wishful thinking is over applied in this way may be a fruitful avenue for further research. At the extreme, we could imagine finding that everyone thinks one another wishfully thinks, but in fact everyone forms their beliefs independent of their desires!

This radical thesis is surely too strong, 13 but oToM may well overestimate the strength of wishful thinking and over generalize it—amplifying a small online effect into a larger social cognition effect.

Attention to whether a task engages potentially amplified oToM representations could provide insight into the considerable heterogeneity of the wishful thinking effect as it has been studied. Specifically, it could help explain why first-person wishful thinking is reliably found in some paradigms and not others.

Taking the social learning of Experiment 2 as an example, oToM learners ignored the belief of the agent whose bet was consistent with his desires. However, if this agent actually formed his beliefs without bias, then the learner would be missing a valuable learning opportunity. Future work should explore the details of these effects. But to the working scientist himself all this appears obvious and trite.

What appears to him as the essence of the situation is that he is not consciously following any prescribed course of action, but feels complete freedom to utilize any method or device whatever which in the particular situation before him seems likely to yield the correct answer. In his attack on his specific problem he suffers no inhibitions of precedent or authority, but is completely free to adopt any course that his ingenuity is capable of suggesting to him.

No one standing on the outside can predict what the individual scientist will do or what method he will follow. In short, science is what scientists do, and there are as many scientific methods as there are individual scientists. This document is a copy of one found on Bob Curtis's Physics Page. But it is another thing altogether to think, because people lived closely with nature, were dependent on nature, and used only simple manual technologies, that they were consequently imbued with an ethic that enjoined them to nurture band protect all things natural at all times.

Indeed, it would be very surprising to find such tender solicitude for non human nature cohabiting with a long history of savage behaviour towards fellow humans. Just a few weeks ago I visited the exhibition of torture instruments in common use in medieval Europe, on display in the Poble Espanyol in Barcelona. Anyone who needs convincing that, despite our many problems, the world today is a place than it was then, should visit that exhibition.

There is no shortage of evidence that, in past ages well before the emergence of science, communities regularly inflicted damage on their local environments - deforestation, over hunting, torture of animals, etc. Indeed, there is evidence that, even in the late Stone Age, man found it difficult to live in harmony with nature.

There is evidence that human beings at the time wiped out dozens of species of large mammals by over kill. Of course I readily admit that several of our modern science based technologies have caused serious environ mental degradation carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning power stations have contributed significantly to the enhanced greenhouse effect; emissions from the refrigeration industry have damaged the ozone layer; the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant caused wide spread radioactive contamination, etc.

But it is wrong to blame these problems on science. Decisions regarding the implementation, scope and policies of science based technology are largely made by non scientists, such as industrialists, politicians and civil servants. To blame science for the pollution emitted by a science based industry makes no more sense than to lay the blame for all fraud and forgery at the door of our education system.

Science is simply the furtherance of knowledge about the material universe using the scientific method of hypothesis and experiment. It is an intrinsically human and good activity.

On the other hand, scientists, just like any other group, are fallible, can make errors of judgment and, at times, can indulge in downright wrong behaviour. For example, scientists developed the atomic bomb. Although there were powerful mitigating circumstances involved in that drama, it was, in my opinion, a wrong decision, and a bad thing to do.

If the actual average risks were desirable i. Using an example, Kuzmanovic explains the phenomenon as follows: "By ignoring unpleasant information, we avoid drawing threatening conclusions. For example, we could neglect federal statistics, which indicate a higher risk of heart attack, because we think we have a particularly healthy lifestyle. During the survey the scientists recorded their brain activity using magnetic resonance tomography.

They found that preferred judgements activate brain regions that otherwise react particularly strongly to rewards such as food or money. In addition, the scientists were able to show for the first time that the reward system in turn influenced other brain regions that are involved in conclusion processes. The stronger this neuronal influence was, the stronger the judgements of the study participants were determined by their wishes. So, our desires and preferences influence our judgment without us consciously realizing it.

The same brain systems that reinforce our efforts to maximize rewards such as food and money would also reinforce specific strategies for constructing judgements.