UConn political science researcher finds so-called 'wishful thinking' correlates with such negatives as polarization, animosity toward opposing side
Wishing really hard for something won't 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's significantly increased over the last 15 years.
"I'm hard-pressed to say why this type of wishful thinking is good," says Seth Warner, an assistant professor in UConn's Department of Political Science. "It 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'd say the reasons this is bad are probably far more numerous."
Warner's study, "Partisan Wishful Thinking in Polarized Times," 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 - one fueling the other.
It's a theory he started to consider in 2011 when he was in a bookstore a full year before the following year's presidential election and noticed on the shelf a countdown timer to the end of President Barack Obama's first term. The idea, he noted, was that Republicans would buy the timer because they presumed Obama wouldn't win a second term.
That got him thinking about why Republicans would expect such a thing. Obama's approval rating was at 50%, he'd handily won the previous election, and his Republican opponents, which included the party's eventual nominee Mitt Romney, weren't polling very well in head-to-head matchups.
"The simple answer is they wanted him to lose," Warner says. "That's why they expected it. We want things, and so we expect them."
Four years later came Donald Trump's 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.
When none of those things happened, he says he wondered why outlets would continue to produce such content. The answer, he assumed, was simple: People were clicking.
"I started thinking about whether people's expectations outpace reality in the direction they want," he says. "What I found was something called 'wishful thinking,' and the central idea is that if you want something to happen, you're also more likely to expect it to happen.
"You see this with sports teams," he explains. "I always want the Mets to do well. If you ask me at the beginning of the season if they'll do well, I say this might be their year. I figure they'll at least make it to the postseason. Tragically, they often fall short of even that."
He continues, "As I read about wishful thinking, I realized there's a flip side when it comes to politics. If you're a Democrat, you want Democrats to win. If you're a Republican, you want Republicans to win. But today, it's just as likely that if you're a Democrat, you don't want Republicans to win. If you're a Republican, you don't want Democrats to win. There's a negative valence to wishful thinking that to this point hasn't been explored."
Significant Downsides
One significant downside of political wishful thinking, Warner points out, is doubting the legitimacy of an election. If one thinks a particular candidate is going to win and they don't, one might question the integrity of the vote, the process to determine the winner and those who participated in the process.
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.
"It's important for political movements to be self-improving. It's important for democratic transitions to be stable and peaceful," he says. "We talk a lot about intellectual humility in the social sciences and how people tend to be better adjusted – and the organizations that they're part of or the movements that they support more self-improving – when there's at least a little humility."
Warner's study, which was published last month in the journal Political Behavior, says that when high political expectations - that is, winning - aren't realized, a voter can come out of the experience more polarized than they'd be otherwise, angrier and filled with more angst.
With that animosity comes what Warner terms "downstream effects."
"They're more likely to forget scandals from their own side. They're more likely to discriminate in social or economic settings on the basis of partisanship. They're 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," he says.
Ending Polarization?
So then, are people all talk when they say they long for unity? Warner doesn't think so.
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're not as popular among those most intimately involved in the political machine.
"At this point in history, there's 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," he notes. "Most Americans are very sincere when they say they'd like to hear different ideas and consider different perspectives. Most Americans, however, aren't involved in politics."
Warner says he has some hope that - almost surprisingly - artificial intelligence has the potential to depolarize Americans and prompt users to consider alternate views.
About 5% of conversations with Anthropic's Claude AI in September, he says, were about political or social topics. While that's 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.
And, right now at least, Claude gives people "vanilla" answers, according to the prompts Warner has used to test its bias.
"People seem to be using this technology as just high-powered search engines to look up questions about how elections, government, or society works," he acknowledges. "To some degree, it is replacing other media consumption. For that reason, there's the potential for AI, in its current setup, to depolarize us."
The question he raises is, "Will the market support a blue and red version of AI sometime in the next five years? Certainly, that's going to exist. There's going to be a woke and a MAGA AI, no doubt. But it's 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'm slightly optimistic about AI's effects on polarization, even as I'm nervous about its effects on society at large," he says.
