Dunning, D., & Balcetis, E. (2013). Wishful seeing: How preferences shape visual perception. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 22(1), 33-37.
People assume that they perceive the world as it really is. In this article, we review research that questions this assumption and instead suggests that people see what they want to see. We discuss classic and current research demonstrating wishful seeing across two perceptual tasks, showing that people categorize ambiguous visual information and represent their environments in ways that align with their desires. Further, we ...