A Bounded Rationality Account of Wishful Thinking

Rebecca Neumann, Anna N. Rafferty, Thomas L. Griffiths

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

People tend towards wishful thinking, in which they overestimate the probability of favorable outcomes and underestimate the probability of unfavorable outcomes. Many explanations for this phenomenon focus on its irrationality. We explore whether wishful thinking could actually help people make better decisions given that they have limited cognitive resources. We consider a situation in which multiple decisions must be made over a period of time, where the consequences of these decisions are not fully determined. We model this situation as a Markov decision process, and incorporate limited cognitive resources by varying the amount of time in the future that the agent considers the consequences of its decisions. Through simulations, we show that with limited cognitive resources, this model can exhibit better performance by incorporating a bias towards wishful thinking. This advantage occurs across a range of decision-making environments, suggesting that the same effect could be applicable to many real life scenarios.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationProceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
PublisherThe Cognitive Science Society
Pages1210-1215
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9780991196708
StatePublished - 2014
Externally publishedYes
Event36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014 - Quebec City, Canada
Duration: Jul 23 2014Jul 26 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of the 36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014

Conference

Conference36th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, CogSci 2014
Country/TerritoryCanada
CityQuebec City
Period7/23/147/26/14

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Cognitive Neuroscience

Keywords

  • Markov decision processes
  • rational process models

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