Wishful thinking and source monitoring

Abstract

Memory distortions sometimes serve a purpose: It may be in our interest to misremember some details of an event or to forget others altogether. The present work examines whether a similar phenomenon occurs for source attribution. Given that the source of a memory provides information about the accuracy of its content, people may be biased toward source attributions that are consistent with desired accuracy. In Experiment 1, participants read desirable and undesirable predictions made by sources differing in their a priori reliability and showed a wishful thinking bias-that is, a bias to attribute desirable predictions to the reliable source and undesirable predictions to the unreliable source. Experiment 2 showed that this wishful thinking effect depends on retrieval processes. Experiment 3 showed that under some circumstances, wishes concerning one event can produce systematic source memory errors for others.

Self-relevance and wishful thinking: Facilitation and distortion in source monitoring

“…Wishful thinking should occur only when there is a preference for a given competitor to win. As expected, in the no-impact control condition there was no significant interaction between predicting source (assigned or unassigned) and accuracy of prediction (accurate or inaccurate) on accurate source decisions, and therefore no evidence of wishful thinking [F(1,39) Gordon et al (2005) that wishful thinking can contribute systematically to source decisions when the outcomes are relevant to others.…”

“…Such effects held both when information impacted a stranger (replicating Gordon et al, 2005) and when it had a personal impact. Participants in these conditions tended to attribute accurate predictions to the preferred system and/or inaccurate predictions to the nonpreferred system, thus making the preferred system appear to be right more often.…”

“…However, other-relevant desires can easily focus on both the success of a preferred other and on the failure of a nonpreferred other. In fact, in the original wishful thinking work by Gordon et al (2005), both validate and discredit effects were seen. When people were encouraged to hope for particular predictions to come true, they attributed these predictions disproportionately to the more accurate source.…”

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When making source attributions, people tend to attribute desirable statements to reliable sources and undesirable statements to unreliable sources, a phenomenon known as the wishful thinking effect (Gordon, Franklin, & Beck, 2005). In the present study, we examined the influence of wishful thinking on source monitoring for self-relevant information.

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“…Of particular interest with respect to the present investigation, the wishful thinking effect is another area of research addressing the influence of desire on source attributions (Gordon, Franklin, & Beck, 2005). In each of two studies, people read a series of desirable and undesirable predictions made by two sources who varied in their reliability.…”