All Thinking is 'Wishful' Thinking

Abstract

People often seek new information and eagerly update their beliefs. Other times they avoid information or resist revising their beliefs. What explains those different reactions? Answers to this question often frame information processing as a competition between cognition and motivation. Here, we dissolve this dichotomy by bringing together two theoretical frameworks: epistemic motivation and active inference. Despite evolving from different intellectual traditions, both frameworks attest to the indispensability of motivational considerations to the epistemic process. The imperatives that guide model construction under the epistemic motivation framework can be mapped onto key constructs in active inference. Drawing these connections offers a way of articulating social psychological constructs in terms of Bayesian computations and provides a generative testing ground for future work.

Keywords: active inference; epistemic motivation; surprise.