Voters’ wishful thinking in an unprecedented event of three national elections repeated within one year: fast thinking, bias, high emotions and potential rationality

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.