{"id":35119,"date":"2026-11-04T17:45:18","date_gmt":"2026-11-04T22:45:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/?p=35119"},"modified":"2026-11-04T10:53:03","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T15:53:03","slug":"wishing-upon-even-star-political-candidates-can-be-dangerous","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/2026\/11\/wishing-upon-even-star-political-candidates-can-be-dangerous\/","title":{"rendered":"Wishing upon even star political candidates can be dangerous"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wishing really hard for something won\u2019t necessarily make it come true, but a new study from a UConn researcher indicates up to 90% of voters expect their side to win an election, a percentage that\u2019s significantly increased over the last 15 years.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m hard-pressed to say why this type of wishful thinking is good,\u201d says Seth Warner, an assistant professor in UConn\u2019s Department of Political Science<\/a>. \u201cIt could be a somewhat healthy coping mechanism, I suppose. Uncertainty creates stress in our lives, and wishful thinking probably alleviates some of that stress. But I\u2019d say the reasons this is bad are probably far more numerous.\u201d<\/p>\n

Warner\u2019s study, \u201cPartisan Wishful Thinking in Polarized Times,\u201d<\/a> looks at national surveys of the electorate taken between 1996 and 2024 and finds that as wishful thinking has grown since 2012 when President Barack Obama sought his second term, so too has political polarization and hatred for the opposing side \u2013 one fueling the other.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a theory he started to consider in 2011 when he was in a bookstore a full year before the following year\u2019s presidential election and noticed on the shelf a countdown timer to the end of President Barack Obama\u2019s first term. The idea, he noted, was that Republicans would buy the timer because they presumed Obama wouldn\u2019t win a second term.<\/p>\n

That got him thinking about why Republicans would expect such a thing. Obama\u2019s approval rating was at 50%, he\u2019d handily won the previous election, and his Republican opponents, which included the party\u2019s eventual nominee Mitt Romney, weren\u2019t polling very well in head-to-head matchups.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe simple answer is they wanted him to lose,\u201d Warner says. \u201cThat\u2019s why they expected it. We want things, and so we expect them.\u201d<\/p>\n

Four years later came Donald Trump\u2019s rise to the White House, and in the years that followed, Warner says he took note when media outlets published stories about the Make America Great Again movement, stories that probed at questions like when it would collapse, how it would collapse, and what would happen afterward.<\/p>\n

When none of those things happened, he says he wondered why outlets would continue to produce such content<\/strong>. The answer, he assumed, was simple: People were clicking.<\/p>\n

\u201cI started thinking about whether people\u2019s expectations outpace reality in the direction they want,\u201d he says. \u201cWhat I found was something called \u2018wishful thinking,\u2019 and the central idea is that if you want something to happen, you\u2019re also more likely to expect it to happen.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou see this with sports teams,\u201d he explains. \u201cI always want the Mets to do well. If you ask me at the beginning of the season if they\u2019ll do well, I say this might be their year. I figure they\u2019ll at least make it to the postseason. Tragically, they often fall short of even that.\u201d<\/p>\n

He continues, \u201cAs I read about wishful thinking, I realized there\u2019s a flip side<\/strong> when it comes to politics. If you\u2019re a Democrat, you want Democrats to win. If you\u2019re a Republican, you want Republicans to win. But today, it\u2019s just as likely that if you\u2019re a Democrat, you don\u2019t want Republicans to win. If you\u2019re a Republican, you don\u2019t want Democrats to win. There\u2019s a negative valence to wishful thinking that to this point hasn\u2019t been explored.\u201d<\/p>\n

Significant Downsides<\/strong><\/p>\n

One significant downside of political wishful thinking, Warner points out, is doubting the legitimacy of an election<\/strong>. If one thinks a particular candidate is going to win and they don\u2019t, one might question the integrity of the vote, the process to determine the winner and those who participated in the process.<\/p>\n

But statistically, in a two-party democracy, each side is going to lose about half the time, and each side needs to be prepared for that possibility, realistically looking at why their side might not win and why the other side might, Warner says.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s important for political movements to be self-improving. It\u2019s important for democratic transitions to be stable and peaceful,\u201d he says. \u201cWe talk a lot about intellectual humility in the social sciences and how people tend to be better adjusted \u2013 and the organizations that they\u2019re part of or the movements that they support more self-improving \u2013 when there\u2019s at least a little humility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Warner\u2019s study, which was published last month in the journal Political Behavior<\/a><\/em>, says that when high political expectations \u2013 that is, winning \u2013 aren\u2019t realized, a voter can come out of the experience more polarized than they\u2019d be otherwise, angrier and filled with more angst.<\/p>\n

With that animosity comes what Warner terms \u201cdownstream effects.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re more likely to forget scandals from their own side. They\u2019re more likely to discriminate in social or economic settings on the basis of partisanship. They\u2019re more likely to buy into stereotypes or misinformation about the other party. There are these big outcomes that speak to the health of a society or of a democracy that are downstream of partisan animosity,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Ending Polarization?<\/strong><\/p>\n

So then, are people all talk when they say they long for unity? Warner doesn\u2019t think so.<\/p>\n

Polls indicate a high number of Americans favor bipartisanship and rate polarization as a major problem, though Warner says that while those are popular sentiments among the general public, they\u2019re not as popular among those most intimately involved in the political machine.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt this point in history, there\u2019s a negative association between how engaged you are with politics and how interested you are in hearing from the other side and considering their ideas,\u201d he notes. \u201cMost Americans are very sincere when they say they\u2019d like to hear different ideas and consider different perspectives. Most Americans, however, aren\u2019t involved in politics.\u201d<\/p>\n

Warner says he has some hope that \u2013 almost surprisingly \u2013 artificial intelligence has the potential to depolarize Americans and prompt users to consider alternate views.<\/p>\n

About 5% of conversations with Anthropic\u2019s Claude AI in September, he says, were about political or social topics. While that\u2019s a small percentage, it still amounts to an estimated 500,000 conversations per day, assuming 11 million daily users in the U.S. as reported early this year.<\/p>\n

And, right now at least, Claude gives people \u201cvanilla\u201d answers, according to the prompts Warner has used to test its bias.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople seem to be using this technology as just high-powered search engines to look up questions about how elections, government, or society works,\u201d he acknowledges. \u201cTo some degree, it is replacing other media consumption. For that reason, there\u2019s the potential for AI, in its current setup, to depolarize us.\u201d<\/p>\n

The question he raises is, \u201cWill the market support a blue and red version of AI sometime in the next five years? Certainly, that\u2019s going to exist. There\u2019s going to be a woke and a MAGA AI, no doubt. But it\u2019s harder for me to think that people are going to approach these tools and ask AI for ideology. These are informational tools, first and foremost. So, I\u2019m slightly optimistic about AI\u2019s effects on polarization, even as I\u2019m nervous about its effects on society at large,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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JOURNAL<\/h4>\n

Political Behavior<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Wishing really hard for something won\u2019t necessarily make it come true, but a new study from a UConn researcher indicates up to 90% of voters expect their side to win an election, a percentage that\u2019s significantly increased over the last 15 years. \u201cI\u2019m hard-pressed to say why this type of wishful thinking is good,\u201d says… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":35120,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"no","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","neve_meta_sidebar":"","neve_meta_container":"","neve_meta_enable_content_width":"off","neve_meta_content_width":70,"neve_meta_title_alignment":"","neve_meta_author_avatar":"","neve_post_elements_order":"","neve_meta_disable_header":"","neve_meta_disable_footer":"","neve_meta_disable_title":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[526,367,991,1089,1436,335,790,1,1363],"tags":[1438,693,154,183,1439,1440,1437],"class_list":["post-35119","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-behaviour","category-bias","category-culture","category-fear","category-hope","category-politics-2","category-social-media","category-uncategorized","category-values","tag-doubting","tag-elections","tag-fear","tag-hope","tag-polarisation","tag-skeptics","tag-wishing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35119","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35119"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35119\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35121,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35119\/revisions\/35121"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35120"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35119"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35119"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35119"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}