A domain-independent framework for modeling emotion
Cognitive Systems Research
Wishful thinking in effective decision making
Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems: volume 1 - Volume 1
Transactions on computational science XII
Affective agents for empathic interactions
ICEC'11 Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Entertainment Computing
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Computational modeling of human belief maintenance and decision-making processes has become increasingly important for a wide range of applications. We present a frame-work for modeling the psychological phenomenon of self-deception in a decision-theoretic framework. Specifically, we model the self-deceptive behavior of wishful thinking as a psychological bias towards the belief in a particularly desirable situation or state. By leveraging the structures and axioms of Expected Utility (EU) Theory we are able to operationalize both the determination and the application of the desired belief state with respect to the decision-making process of expected utility maximization. While we categorize our framework as a descriptive model of human decision making, we show that in certain circumstances the realized expected utility of an action biased by wishful thinking can exceed that of an action motivated purely by the maximization of perceived expected utility. Finally, we show that our framework of self-deception and wishful thinking has the descriptive flexibility to account for the inconsistencies high-lighted by the Common Ratio Effect and the Allais Paradox.