Abstract

Wishful thinking (WT) of Israeli voters was measured in the unprecedented event of three failing national elections repeated within one year. WT is considered as Type 1 fast/intuitive thinking leading to bias. A novel method for measuring WT – including relevant campaign information and distinguishing between “WT for self” and “WT for others” – was introduced. WT components of voters in leading and trailing camps were compared across the three elections to examine whether patterns would be consistent or haphazard. Despite the presumed uncontrolled nature of WT, the patterns were not haphazard but rather consistent. We also tried to debias WT by applying a novel variation of incentive intervention to shift respondents from fast thinking to slow, rational Type 2 thinking. Unlike past studies, the method was extremely effective in debiasing WT and leading to realistic predictions. However, this was true only for self-WT and not for WT for others.

摘要

以色列选民的一厢情愿 (WT) 是在一年内重复三次失败的全国选举这一史无前例的事件中衡量的。WT 被认为是导致偏见的 1 型快速/直觉思维。引入了一种衡量 WT 的新方法——包括相关活动信息和区分“自我 WT”和“他人 WT”。在三场选举中比较领先和落后阵营选民的 WT 组成部分，以检查模式是一致的还是随意的。尽管假定 WT 具有不受控制的性质，但这些模式并不是随意的，而是一致的。我们还尝试通过应用一种新颖的激励干预变体来消除 WT 的偏见，将受访者从快速思维转变为缓慢、理性的 2 型思维。与以往的研究不同，该方法在消除 WT 偏差并导致现实预测方面非常有效。然而，这仅适用于自我 WT，而不适用于其他 WT。