Goal-based denial and wishful thinking

Denial and wishful thinking are well known affective phenomena that influence human belief processes. Put simply, they consist of tendencies to disbelieve what one would not like to be true, and believe what one would like to be true. We present an approach to an agent´s belief dynamics, that simulates denial and wishful thinking, using the agent´s goals as the source of affective preference. Our approach also addresses several issues concerning the use of conventional belief revision in human-like autonomous agents. In our approach, every goal produces a wishful thought about its achievement, in the form of a weak belief. Consequently, a “disliked situation” leads to inconsistent beliefs, thus triggering belief revision. Furthermore, the agent´s belief set is selected based on a measure of preference that accounts for the “likeability” of beliefs (among other factors). We test an instantiation of our model to assess whether the resulting agent could produce the intended behaviors. The agent produces behaviors of denial and wishful thinking, not only as biases in belief selection, but also as the triggers to hold or reject certain beliefs.