Why We Imagine What We Want To Experience?

In this world most of us can recall an occurrence from our own non – Jedi lives where there are some words which enclose so true once obi – Wan Kenobi advised to Luke skywalker to not trust his eyes because “your eyes can deceive you”. In our daily life there is most of the time a moment hit us when your eyes saw what they wished to see, or a person you were thinking about in your busy schedule. This phenomenon, called motivated perception, has been reconnoitering in psychological research for decades. Undoubtedly, the world as we apprehend it in our awareness is not exactly an accurate representation of what it truly is.
Some of the time even our covet can affect what we see by impacting the way we process visual intelligence. Such as when conferred with an inconclusive figure that could be made clear either as the letter B or the number 13, participants in one study were more likely to report seeing that which aligned with desirable outcomes over less desirable ones (in this case, drinking orange juice if they saw a letter or drinking a foul-smelling smoothie if they saw a number).
In our recent research published in nature human behavior testify to how our motivations and desires can give surge to two biases, a perceptual bias(when our motivations have a top-down influence on our perceptions) and a response bias (when we report seeing what we wish to see). The study, led by researchers from Stanford University, explores how these biases affect our perceptions. It proposes underlying neuro computational mechanisms that guide these judgments.
Our expectations are like they make us see the false that aren’t there. Decades of research have proven that expectation is a powerful force. It acts on our perceptions much as gravity acts on light, bending them in ways that are assessable by others, but, at least to us, undetectable. Not only do we tend to see what we expect to see, we also tend to experience what we expect to experience. As Hitchcock proved, this can make all the difference. The tendency to let expectation be our guide can cause even those of us who are intelligent, experienced, and well-trained to overlook some startlingly obvious things.
Thus, the wish to see a convinced image affected the participants’ judgment, reflecting both a perceptual as well as a response bias – they not only tended to report seeing what they had wished to see, but they were also more likely to actually see what they wished to see.
By: Tripti Varun
Content: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/between-cultures/201907/why-we-see-what-we-want-see