A girlfriend he never met? Seems silly, but Te’o among many who claim online wishful thinking

The Washington Post:

It started out a stunner: The Heisman Trophy runner-up had told heartbreaking stories about a dead girlfriend who didn’t exist. Then it became unreal: The All-American linebacker said he had been duped, and theirs was a relationship that existed only in phone calls and Internet chats.

The reaction was predictable: Unbelievable. Couldn’t happen.

…

“If we shake the tree, we would find hundreds of thousands of people falling out of the tree who are experiencing something like this,” said Robert Epstein, a senior research psychologist at the California-based American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology.

It’s just human nature, Epstein said, something known formally by psychologists as “confirmation bias.” We watch the news that matches our political beliefs. We discount viewpoints we don’t like. We ignore good advice and miss red flags, so we can continue believing in something we want to be true.

Read the whole story: The Washington Post