ArticleNature human behaviour2024
Bayesianism and wishful thinking are compatible.
Article in Nature human behaviour, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 7 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
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Who cites it
7 citing papers in PubMed.
- Affective valence as a computational signal for learning value.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Rewards bias self-evaluations of ability.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Mental imagery in the context of online compulsive buying-shopping disorder: The role of pleasure and relief.Addictive behaviors reports · 2025Article
- Distributional dual-process model predicts strategic shifts in decision-making under uncertainty.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- The critical role of emotional communication for motivated reasoning.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Hidden Reward: Affect and Its Prediction Errors as Windows Into Subjective Value.Current directions in psychological science · 2024Article
- Animal affect, welfare and the Bayesian brain.Animal welfare (South Mimms, England) · 2024Review
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
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.
Indexed as
Identifiers
38396212What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.