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| Wishful Thinking Bias |
Time for Reflection
Haven't we all engaged in wishful thinking, some time or the other, and then realising that things don't turn out to be as we assumed them to be ?
Well, the only explanation to the above is that there's a difference between illusion and reality and we tend to ignore it because of a fallacy known as "Wishful Thinking"
Definition
Wishful Thinking Bias refers to the tendency of decision-making and belief formation based on what might be pleasing to imagine, rather than on evidence, rationality, or reality.
Our interpretation of things is around how we want to interpret them and not as how they actually are. Few examples of wishful thinking are - hallucinations, religious/ spiritual beliefs, day-dreaming, assumptions aligned with our beliefs and goals.
Wishful-Thinking Bias is an outcome of
- our belief in something that we believe to be true/ false
- overstimation of our abilites which may, in fact, be influenced by our earlier success or failure and impacted us to develop generalisations
- our inability to actualise things and therefore falling back upon being wishful
- our long-held belief, maybe as a result of our culture or religion
Few of the key negative impact of the Wishful-thinking bias are that
- it leads us into creating a self-affirming universe of ours, a Utopia, which, in fact, might be a Dystopia
- it may hinder our progress and growth
- leads us to develop self-limiting habits like procrastination, etc.
- it may have a detrimental impact on our self-confidence and self-esteem, when we realise that things have not turned out to be as we wanted them to
Some of the simple ways to address wishful thinking are to
- become more action-oriented
- spend sufficient time in planning stage
- take smaller steps
- establish realistic goals and do a regular follow up on progress made
- regularly update our belief system (wherever and whenever needed)
- ensuring that our religious beliefs and practices do not turn into an obsession
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