Our eyes may be playing tricks on us: New research shows that sometimes people actually see what they want to see. Social psychologist David Dunning of Cornell University recently devised experiments to test whether wishful thinking can affect our seeing. "It's well established from evidence in everyday life and the laboratory that people think what they want to think," he says. "We're taking this a step beyond. We're asking if desires and fears can influence literally what people physically see."
Dunning and coauthor Emily Balcetis told volunteers that a computer game would assign them either a letter or number to determine whether they would drink freshly squeezed orange juice or a bad-tasting smoothie.
As Dunning and Balcetis wrote in the
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,
the computer flashed an ambiguous image that could be seen as either the letter B or the number 13. Volunteers told that a letter ...
