University of Iowa, USA.
University of Iowa, USA.
Cognition. 2022 Dec;229:105254. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2022.105254. Epub 2022 Aug 24.
The desirability bias (or wishful thinking effect) refers to when a person's desire regarding an event's occurrence has an unwarranted, optimistic influence on expectations about that event. Past experimental tests of this effect have been dominated by paradigms in which uncertainty about the target event is purely stochastic-i.e., involving only aleatory uncertainty. In six studies, we detected desirability biases using two new paradigms in which people made predictions about events for which their uncertainty was both aleatory and epistemic. We tested and meta-analyzed the impact of two potential moderators: the strength of evidence and the level of stochasticity. In support of the first moderator hypothesis, desirability biases were larger when people were making predictions about events for which the evidence for the possible outcomes was of similar strength (vs. not of similar strength). Regarding the second moderator hypothesis, the overall results did not support the notion that the desirability bias would be larger when the target event was higher vs. lower in stochasticity, although there was some significant evidence for moderation in one of the two paradigms. The findings broaden the generalizability of the desirability bias in predictions, yet they also reveal boundaries to an account of how stochasticity might provide affordances for optimistically biased predictions.
期望偏差（或一厢情愿效应）是指当一个人对某事件发生的期望受到不适当的、乐观的影响时，就会出现这种情况。过去对这种效应的实验测试主要集中在这样的范式中，即目标事件的不确定性纯粹是随机的，即只涉及偶然不确定性。在六项研究中，我们使用两种新的范式来检测期望偏差，人们可以根据偶然和认知不确定性来预测事件。我们测试并元分析了两个潜在的调节因素的影响：证据的强度和随机性的水平。为了支持第一个调节因子假说，当人们对证据相似的可能结果的事件进行预测时，期望偏差更大（而不是相似的强度）。关于第二个调节因子假说，尽管在两个范式中的一个中存在一些显著的调节证据，但总体结果并不支持目标事件的随机性越高，期望偏差越大的观点。这些发现拓宽了期望偏差在预测中的可推广性，但也揭示了如何将随机性作为乐观偏差预测的支持因素的解释的局限性。
