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The Planning Fallacy
Abstract
The planning fallacy refers to a prediction phenomenon, all too familiar to many, wherein people underestimate the time it will take to complete a future task, despite knowledge that previous tasks have generally taken longer than planned. In this chapter, we review theory and research on the planning fallacy, with an emphasis on a programmatic series of investigations that we have conducted on this topic. We first outline a definition of the planning fallacy, explicate controversies and complexities surrounding its definition, and summarize empirical research documenting the scope and generality of the phenomenon. We then explore the origins of the planning fallacy, beginning with the classic inside–outside cognitive model developed by Kahneman and Tversky [Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Intuitive prediction: biases and corrective procedures. TIMS Studies in Management Science, 12, 313–327]. Finally, we develop an extended inside–outside model that integrates empirical research examining cognitive, motivational, social, and behavioral processes underlying the planning fallacy.
... The phrase refers to the pervasive human tendency to hold "the conviction that a current project will go as well as planned even though most projects from a relevant comparison set have failed to fulfill their planned outcomes." Controlled experiments have repeatedly validated the phenomenon (Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010). ...
... Management and social scientists have explored the planning fallacy's operations and implications specifically in business Flyvbjerg, Lovallo, & Kahneman, 2003) and major infrastructure projects (Flyvbjerg, Garbuio, & Lovallo, 2009). Many of the problems they found in particular cases traced to faulty decisions related to the planning fallacy (Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010). ...
... It is extremely difficult to see it in ourselves, and the practically minded people who predominate in decisions regarding acquisition programs seem particularly resistant to such introspection. But we can see it outside of ourselves, if we are able to look dispassionately, and that offers an important clue about what might be done to mitigate its ill effects (Buehler et al., 2010). ...
... money) they will spend on upcoming events. Previous studies of spending predictions implied that predictions concerning time and money are remarkably similar: Individuals appeared to exhibit a "budget fallacy" (Peetz & Buehler, 2009;Ülkümen et al., 2008) very similar in nature to the welldocumented "planning fallacy" (Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010;Buehler et al., 1994) wherein people underestimate the time they will spend on a future task despite knowledge that similar tasks have taken longer in the past. However, other work has suggested that there is no "budget fallacy" in spending predictions like there is a "planning fallacy" in time predictions (Spiller & Lynch, 2010). ...
... Another important consideration is the potential for the predictions themselves to have a causal impact on behavior, an effect that again might depend on the single-session nature of events versus the multiple-session of time periods. Previous work has found that predictions of task completion time are more likely to guide actual behavior for singlesession, uninterrupted events than for multiple session events (Buehler et al., 2010). Similarly, low spending predictions might result in less actual spending for a single event but not for a series of multiple events (i.e., time periods). ...
... It is important to note, however, that participants in Study 2 made predictions far in advance of their actual spending, and it is therefore unlikely that they even remembered their predictions or that their predictions affected behavior. Future research could attempt to examine the causal impact of spending predictions using paradigms similar to those used to examine the impact of other kinds of predictions (Buehler et al., 2010;Morwitz & Fitzsimons, 2004;Sherman, 1980). Continued investigation of the cognitive and motivational processes underlying spending predictions will shed light on when and why we are prone to underestimate our expenses, and yield insights that can be applied to improve our personal financial planning. ...
Personal spending predictions are sometimes optimistically biased because predictors focus on their current savings goals. The present studies explored the role of savings goals in prediction by comparing spending predictions for time periods and discrete events. Contemplating a concrete event may elicit specific goals that compete with a focus on savings goals. Consistent with this hypothesis, Studies 1 and 2 revealed that participants relied less on savings goals, and were less biased, when predicting event spending rather than weekly spending. Study 3 demonstrated the causal impact of focusing on goals that compete with savings goals: Participants induced to focus on competing goals predicted to spend more money next week, and relied less on savings goals to generate their predictions.
... The tendency to underestimate future spending may be due, in part, to cognitive processes underlying prediction. To generate behavioral predictions, people typically create a mental representation of the target event, such as an imagined scenario of the event unfolding (Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010;Dunning, 2007;Epley & Dunning, 2000;Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). To predict their spending for an upcoming week, for instance, individuals may mentally simulate the upcoming week, imagining the expenses they will encounter as the week unfolds. ...
... Unpacking procedures have been advocated to address a variety of biases in self-relevant prediction and evaluation (Kruger & Evans, 2004;Savitsky, Van Boven, Epley, & Wight, 2005). Kruger and Evans (2004) showed that unpacking can curb people's tendency to underestimate task completion times (i.e., the planning fallacy; Buehler et al., 2010). In comparison to control participants, those prompted to unpack a target task (e.g., formatting a document) by listing all the individual subtasks required to carry it out (e.g., italicizing, punctuating, adding special characters) predicted the task would take longer, and thus were less likely to underestimate completion times (for a related effect, see Forsyth & Burt, 2008). ...
... To consider the impact of unpacking on prediction accuracy, we distinguish between two forms of accuracy, referred to as bias and discrimination (Epley & Dunning, 2006; see also Buehler et al., 2010;Dunning, 2007;Kruger & Evans, 2004). Discrimination or correlational accuracy refers to whether individuals scoring higher on prediction (relative to others in the sample) also score relatively high on actual behavior; this can be indexed here by the correlation between predicted and actual spending. ...
People often underestimate their future personal spending. Across four studies we examined an “unpacking” intervention to reduce this bias. Participants predicted spending for an upcoming week (Study 1), a weekend (Study 2a), a vacation (Study 2b), and for weeks versus self-nominated events (Study 3), and subsequently reported actual spending. In each case, unpacking the details of expected expenses increased spending predictions. In contexts where predictions tended to be too low (Study 1, 3), unpacking eliminated underestimation bias. However, in contexts where predictions were already unbiased, unpacking introduced an overestimation bias (Study 2, 3). Unpacking appears to make predictions bigger, not necessarily better.
... teams pace themselves according to the time allocated and transfer this pace to later moments in time (harrison, mohammed, mcGrath, Florey, & vanderstoep, 2003). product development projects are notorious for running overtime (Buehler, Griffin, & peetz, 2010). third, because time is part of a process and used as a resource, it has acquired the meaning and function of providing structure. ...
... present-oriented people are more impulsive, a trait associated with distraction (steel, 2007), and are particularly vulnerable to choosing the closest option in time (reacting to a perceived immediate demand at the cost of procrastinating on other items) (van eerde, 2000). in line with construal level theory (liberman & trope, 2008), longer term predictions tend to be more abstract, and predictions on future performance rely on temporal distance. the further away in the future, the less contextual information is taken into account, which is one of the mechanisms leading to overly optimistic planning (Buehler, Griffin, & peetz, 2010). time horizons matter to progressing mne entrepreneurial initiatives because of the greater uncertainty in early stages of the initiative as opposed to later stages. ...
... A teaching team which completes its curriculum documentation by working late into the night the day before it is due has likely fallen victim to the planning fallacy, defined as the tendency 'to underestimate the time required to complete a project, even when we have considerable experience of past failures to live up to planned schedules' (Kahneman and Tversky 1982b). The planning fallacy can be observed in major public building and infrastructure projects as well as in more prosaic instances such as academics writing a text book (Kahneman 2011, 245-247), or psychology students completing their masters dissertations (Buehler, Griffin, and Peetz 2010). The planning fallacy is not merely underestimating how long a task will take, but doing this when we have reliable information from our own or others' experience that the task will take much longer. ...
... Research on the planning fallacy has led to numerous suggestions for its avoidance (Kahneman and Tversky 1982b;Buehler, Griffin, and Peetz 2010). A critical step for academics or teaching teams redesigning assessment tasks would be to estimate time needed based on past experience of similar tasks, not on an overly optimistic forecast of their forthcoming work, that is, they should adopt an 'outside' view. ...
Despite widespread recognition of the need to improve assessment in higher education, assessment tasks in individual courses are too often dominated by conventional methods. While changing assessment depends on many factors, improvements to assessment ultimately depend on the decisions and actions of individual educators. This paper considers research within the ‘heuristics and biases’ tradition in the field of decision-making and judgement which has identified unconscious factors with the potential to limit capacity for such change. The paper focuses on issues that may compromise the process of improving assessment by supporting a reluctance to change existing tasks, by limiting the time allocated to develop alternative assessment tasks, by underestimating the degree of change needed or by an unwarranted overconfidence in assessment design decisions. The paper proposes countering these unconscious limitations to change by requiring justification for changing, or not changing, assessment tasks, and by informal and formal peer review of assessment task design. Finally, an agenda for research on heuristics and biases in assessment design is suggested in order to establish their presence and help counter their influence.
... 415). Planning fallacy happens as soon as the individual ignores his/her past experience and performance and adopts his/her internal perspective, i.e. maintaining their optimism about the current project in the face of historical evidence to the contrary (Buehler et al., 2010;Pychyl et al., 2000). ...
... Note. "mi is the number of media typically used while using primary medium i, hi is the number of hours per[day] reportedly spent using primary medium i, and htotal is the total number of hours per [day] spent with all primary media"(Ophir et al., 2009, p. 15586).For measuring planning fallacy, the author constructed the scale based on conceptual comprehension from previous studies(Buehler et al., 2010;Buehler, Griffin, & Ross, 1994;Koole & van't Spijker, 2000;Pezzo, Pezzo, & Stone, 2006;Pychyl et al., 2000). Among others, the dimensions are optimism, imposing a deadline, ignorance of the past mistakes (of similar tasks), confidence in resources, and self-representation. ...
Some adverse effects of procrastination are anxiety, tension, loss of valuable opportunities, as well as the breakdown of relationships with other people. This study assumed that procrastination is learned. Procrastination can be avoided by identifying its predictors; the question is: Are courage, media multitasking, and planning fallacy able to predict the decisional procrastination? The purpose of this study was to test the following hypotheses: (1) Courage can predict decisional procrastination in the negative direction; (2) Media multitasking can predict it in a positive direction, and (3) Planning fallacy can predict it in a positive direction. Participants of this study were 192 university students in the Greater Area of Jakarta, the capital of Indonesia (116 males, 76 females; mean of age = 20.77 years old; standard deviation = 3.02 years) recruited using convenience sampling technique. The research data were obtained through questionnaires in Indonesian and analyzed using multiple linear regression analysis. Multiple linear regression analysis showed that our model can explain the decisional procrastination, with Rsquare = 6.4%. This study found that (1) The higher one’s courage, the lower his/her decisional procrastination, (2) Media multitasking and planning fallacy cannot predict it. Since the planning fallacy is laden with cognitive processes, courage has a dominant affective or behavioral attitudinal nuance, and media multitasking can be viewed as a psychomotor variable; the current study concludes that the affective variable is the principal thing to be intervened to prevent or stop the decisional procrastination.
... Nevertheless, despite the potential benefits of accurate self-prediction, a wealth of research indicates that people's predictions about their future behavior and outcomes are often inaccurate and, in many cases, tend to be overly optimistic (for reviews see Armor & Taylor, 1998;Dunning, 2007). Individuals hoping to finish a future task promptly underestimate the time it will require (Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010) and those seeking to improve their personal finances underestimate their future spending (Peetz & Buehler, 2009) and overestimate future savings (Koehler, White, & John, 2011). People also overestimate the likelihood that they will have long and happy relationships (MacDonald & Ross, 1999), land high paying jobs (Hoch, 1985), perform well on tests and exams (Gilovich, Kerr, & Medvec, 1993;Shepperd, Ouellette, & Fernadez., 1996;Helzer & Dunning, 2012), give generously to charity (Epley & Dunning, 2000), donate blood (Koehler & Poon, 2006;Tanner & Carlson, 2009), vote in upcoming elections (Epley & Dunning, 2006), and engage in healthy behaviors (Lipkus & Shepperd, 2009). ...
... A plausible explanation for optimistic bias in selfpredictions is that people do not adjust their predictions sufficiently in light of information they have, or can gen- erate, regarding situational barriers that will predictably affect their probability of completing the target activity. This account is compatible with previous research emphasizing the role of plans and intentions in the self-prediction process (e.g., Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010;Helzer & Dunning, 2012;Koehler & Poon, 2006;Koehler et al., 2011;Peetz & Buehler, 2009). It suggests that selfpredictions would be improved if greater attention was paid to, and greater weight placed on, situational barriers that can interfere with the completion of planned or intended action. ...
When people predict their future behavior, they tend to place too much weight on their current intentions, which produces an optimistic bias for behaviors associated with currently strong intentions. More realistic self-predictions require greater sensitivity to situational barriers, such as obstacles or competing demands, that may interfere with the translation of current intentions into future behavior. We consider three reasons why people may not adjust sufficiently for such barriers. First, self-predictions may focus exclusively on current intentions, ignoring potential barriers altogether. We test this possibility, in three studies, with manipulations that draw greater attention to barriers. Second, barriers may be discounted in the self-prediction process. We test this possibility by comparing prospective and retrospective ratings of the impact of barriers on the target behavior. Neither possibility was supported in these tests, or in a further test examining whether an optimally weighted statistical model could improve on the accuracy of self-predictions by placing greater weight on anticipated situational barriers. Instead, the evidence supports a third possibility: Even when they acknowledge that situational factors can affect the likelihood of carrying out an intended behavior, people do not adequately moderate the weight placed on their current intentions when predicting their future behavior.
... Cassar (2010) suggère que l'élaboration d'un plan d'affaires et de prévisions financières tend à renforcer l'optimisme exagéré de l'entrepreneur au travers d'une vision interne du projet (Kahneman et Lovallo, 1993) caractéristique du biais cognitif connu comme « planning fallacy » . Ce biais est caractérisé par une sousestimation du temps et des ressources nécessaires à la conclusion d'un projet (Buehler, Griffin et Peetz, 2010). ...
... Tout d'abord, il faudrait créer des configurations institutionnelles où le porteur de projet soit confronté à une diversité d'acteurs susceptible de générer des avis différents et contradictoires, afin de balayer le champ des possibles dans une optique de réduction du risque d'échec et d'augmentation du potentiel du projet. Cette confrontation est en phase avec les recommandations de pour susciter une vision externe du projet afin d'éviter les biais associés au phénomène de « planning fallacy » (Buehler, Griffin et Peetz, 2010). De plus, cela permettrait au porteur de projet de prendre du recul par rapport à ladite expertise d'un seul accompagnateur, évitant ainsi que celui-ci provoque une accélération ou un ralentissement exagéré du processus de création. ...
Cet article interroge l’accompagnement à partir d’une réflexion de fond sur la prise de décision et de risque en entrepreneuriat. En adoptant une approche abductive et pragmatique basée à la fois sur notre expérience dans l’accompagnement et sur une articulation approfondie de trois corpus théoriques distincts, nous présentons une vision dynamique du processus de création d’entreprise dans laquelle un porteur de projet accompagné doit prendre des décisions face à l’incertitude et à son évaluation du risque, et cela malgré les limites de sa rationalité. Les décisions et les actions qui en découlent auront des conséquences dont une partie sera imprévisible et non-intentionnelle, mais qui auront tout de même un impact sur les dialogiques porteur/projet, projet/accompagnateur et porteur/accompagnateur. A partir de cette mise en perspective nous discutons trois dérives possibles des systèmes d’accompagnement sur la prise de décision et de risque en création d’entreprise : le retrait face à l’expertise de l’accompagnateur, la soumission aux contraintes imposées par les systèmes d’accompagnement même aux dépens du projet et de son porteur et la possible altération temporelle inadéquate du processus entrepreneurial. Nous concluons en évoquant quelques pistes de réflexion pouvant aider à éviter ces dérives et pouvant constituer d’intéressantes voies de recherche future.
... Along similar lines, people underestimate how much they will spend in a coming week, even if they know that they typically spend more than the predicted amount (Peetz & Buehler, 2009). These findings are in line with a host of studies on the planning fallacy, many of which suggest that people grossly underestimate the amount of time a given future task will take because they fail to adequately take into account past task completion times (e.g., Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010;Buehler, Griffin, & Ross, 1994). ...
... In understanding the reasons underlying the planning fallacy, Buehler, Griffin, and Peetz (2010) have suggested that people are likely to take one of two approaches to making predictions: the inside view and the outside view (e.g., Kahneman & Lovallo, 1993). When adopting the "inside view," people are likely to consider the specific aspects of a given case at hand, making it all the more likely that they will see that particular instance as unique. ...
Consumer prediction encompasses the cognitive, affective, and motivational psychological processes by which consumers anticipate (and subsequently produce) the future. Prediction is a pervasive factor in consumer decision making, from everyday decisions such as which lunch one should purchase to major decisions about how much one will need to save for retirement. More generally, predictions are the method by which consumers determine which choice options will bring them the greatest satisfaction in the present and by which they anticipate their needs and wants in the near and distant future. In this chapter, we examine the processes by which consumers infer whether and what will happen in the future, the accuracy of their predictions, their antecedents, and consequents. We (i) review the two dimensions of prediction that have been most studied, utility and psychological distance, and how they combine to determine the perceived value of prospects (choice options). We (ii) discuss innovative research on these topics over the last decade, and (iii) end with important open questions and promising future directions.I. Dimensions of Prediction Guided by the evaluation of prospective (future) events in terms of their expected value (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979; Von Neumann & Morgenstern, 1947), the two dimensions of prediction typically studied by consumer psychologists are (a) the utility of future events and (b) their probability of occurrence. In this chapter, we discuss these two dimensions of prediction in terms of their recently refined and expanded definitions. Specifically, we review the concept of utility in terms of a refined definition that distinguishes between indirect and direct measures of utility. We review the concept of probability as an instance of a broader dimension of psychological distance, which also includes time, physical space, and more abstract forms of distance such as social connection.Utility Utility is a measure of the value of a stimulus that typically connotes the total pleasure or pain associated with its anticipation, experience, and recollection. Consumer prediction research typically examines two kinds of utility associated with a future event: its decision utility and its predicted utilit (Kahneman, Wakker, & Sarin, 1997; Morewedge, in press; Shiv & Huber, 2000). Decision utility refers to relative preference that people exhibit for different stimuli, measured through indirect methods such as observing which stimulus they choose when given a choice of stimuli and their willingness to pay for a stimulus
... For example, commonly examined temporal judgments are predictions about the future (Dunning, 2007;Krizan & Windschitl, 2007). In general, these predictions-both about controllable and uncontrollable events-tend to be overly optimistic (e.g., Weinstein, 1980;Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010). People tend to predict that they will complete tasks earlier than they really do (Buehler, Griffin, & Ross, 1994), spend less money in the future than they really do (Peetz & Buehler, 2009), expect to act more generous than they really do (Epley & Dunning, 2006), and by and large expect to perform better on tests than they really do (Kruger & Dunning, 1999;Gilovich, Kerr, & Medvec, 1993). ...
... People Figure 1. Topics covered in this Special Issue often forecast how they might feel (for a review, see Wilson & Gilbert, 2005) or act in the future (for a review, see Dunning, 2007, andBuehler et al., 2010). As previously noted, predictions about future behavior are optimistically biased, but predictions about future feelings are also often inaccurate. ...
... Time prediction is another example of a "quasi-probabilistic" estimation task, since estimating the time or duration of a future event is related to estimating the probability that the event will fall before or after a certain moment in time. Several studies have been conducted where participants were asked to predict the time it will take them to complete a task (e.g., an academic project or an assignment), and where predictions were compared with actual outcomes [53]. These studies consistently show that people tend to be overly optimistic in their predictions irrespective of their past experience, a bias called the planning fallacy [53]. ...
... Several studies have been conducted where participants were asked to predict the time it will take them to complete a task (e.g., an academic project or an assignment), and where predictions were compared with actual outcomes [53]. These studies consistently show that people tend to be overly optimistic in their predictions irrespective of their past experience, a bias called the planning fallacy [53]. ...
—Information visualization designers strive to design data displays that allow for efficient exploration, analysis, and
communication of patterns in data, leading to informed decisions. Unfortunately, human judgment and decision making are imperfect
and often plagued by cognitive biases. There is limited empirical research documenting how these biases affect visual data analysis
activities. Existing taxonomies are organized by cognitive theories that are hard to associate with visualization tasks. Based on a
survey of the literature we propose a task-based taxonomy of 154 cognitive biases organized in 7 main categories. We hope the
taxonomy will help visualization researchers relate their design to the corresponding possible biases, and lead to new research that
detects and addresses biased judgment and decision making in data visualization.
... People are often inaccurate and biased when estimating duration. This is true both for estimations of past task duration (Block & Zakay, 1997;Fraisse, 1963;Ornstein, 1969;Poynter, 1989;Wallace & Rabin, 1960) and future task duration (Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010;Halkjelsvik & Jørgensen, 2012;Roy, Christenfeld, & McKenzie, 2005). There appear to be a number of similarities in when and where estimations of past and future task duration are likely to be biased due to factors such as the actual task duration and familiarity with the task (Roy et al., 2005;Roy & Christenfeld, 2007Roy, Christenfeld, & Jones, 2013;Thomas, Handley, & Newstead, 2004. ...
... The focus of research on retrospective time estimation generally involves theoretical mechanisms that are relevant to estimating duration, such as attention and memory storage (Block & Zakay, 1997;Grondin, 2010). Research on future task duration, while still theoretically grounded, tends to focus more on interventions that could improve predictive accuracy (Buehler et al., 2010;Halkjelsvik & Jørgensen, 2012;Roy et al., 2005). For example, research has examined techniques such as having participants try to think about all the subcomponents of a task before estimating how long it will take them to complete the full task (unpacking: Kruger & Evans, 2004) and supplying participants with the duration of another relevant task before estimating task duration (anchoring: König, 2005). ...
We examined whether or not interventions that have been used to try to influence predictions of future task duration-unpacking, summing and anchoring-had a similar effect on retrospective estimations of duration. In three studies, participants experienced a number of short stimuli, such as watching videos, before estimating the duration for each of the stimuli and the overall duration. The first estimation given served as an anchor for all following estimates. If the first estimation was highly biased in one direction, then subsequent estimates were more likely to also be biased in the same direction. Additionally, separate estimates for a number of individual tasks differed from the estimates for all of the tasks combined. This incongruity happened even though all estimates were given in sequence. Overall, results indicated that memories of past task duration could be influenced by the manner in which they were elicited.
... Goals exist in a hierarchy, with lower level goals supporting each higher level goal (Austin and Vancouver 1996;Baumgartner and Pieters 2008). Lower level goals tend to be narrower and implemental (Gollwitzer and Brandstätter 1997), triggering "inside thinking" like that underpinning the planning fallacy (Buehler, Griffin, and Peetz 2010). When trying to find a place for the phone charger, one conditions on this single goal and finds a way to accomplish it. ...
... They also tend to persevere too long for a marginal payoff at the expense of better opportunities (Koehler and Massey 2011). Moreover, prior work on the planning fallacy shows that people are overoptimistic about the likelihood of accomplishing monetary and time goals (Buehler et al. 2010;Ü lkümen, Thomas, and Morwitz 2008). Participants may convince themselves that they can complete their lists in the earlier malls and complete the third mall (cf. ...
When consumers perceive that a resource is limited and may be insufficient to accomplish goals, they recruit and enact plans to cope with the shortage. We distinguish two common strategies: efficiency planning yields savings by stretching the resource, whereas priority planning does so by sacrificing less important goals. Using a variety of methods to explore both financial and time planning, we investigate how the two types of planning differ, how they vary with constraint, and how they interrelate. Relative to efficiency planning, priority planning is perceived as yielding larger one-time savings, but it feels more costly because it requires trade-offs within-resource (e.g., money for money) as opposed to cross-resource (e.g., time for money). As constraint increases and greater resource savings are required, prioritization becomes more likely. However, the shift to prioritization is often insufficient, and consumers tend to react to insufficient prioritization dysfunctionally, making a bad situation worse. Budgeting helps consumers behave more adaptively. Budgeters respond to constraint with more priority planning than nonbudgeters, and they report fewer dysfunctional behaviors, like overspending and impulsive shopping.
... In this research, we suggest that both HSC and LSC individuals express a certain "planning fallacy" (Buehler et al., 1994(Buehler et al., , 2010. This fallacy occurs because distant future situations are interpreted differently than near future situations. ...
... LSC individuals may be more likely to engage in effortful tasks in the distant than in the near future not only because of their tendency to avoid or delay effortful tasks, but also because they experience lower SSE in the near than in the distant future. When it comes to deciding whether to engage in a future effortful task or not, LSC individuals' "planning fallacy" (Buehler et al., 2010) expresses an optimistic-bias toward future events. Optimism bias in the context of planning ahead tasks suggests that individuals are more optimistic about successfully completing tasks, and about how long those tasks would take, for distant future tasks compared with near future tasks (Buehler et al., 1994;Buehler and Griffin, 2003). ...
Self-efficacy constitutes a key factor that influences people's inclination to engage in effortful tasks. In this study, we focus on an interesting interplay between two prominent factors known to influence engagement in effortful tasks: the timing of the task (i.e., whether the task is scheduled to take place in the near or distant future) and individuals' levels of self-control. Across three studies, we show that these two factors have an interacting effect on self-efficacy. Low self-control (LSC) individuals report higher self-efficacy for distant-future effortful tasks than for near-future tasks, whereas high self-control (HSC) individuals report higher self-efficacy for near-future tasks than for distant future tasks. We further demonstrate how self-efficacy then molds individuals' willingness to engage in those effortful tasks. Given that a particular task may comprise effortful aspects alongside more enjoyable aspects, we show that the effects we observe emerge with regard to a task whose effortful aspects are salient and that the effects are eliminated when the enjoyable aspects of that same task are highlighted.
... We contend that influenza, as a health shock, has the potential to trigger loan default by constraining a family's budget due to personal illness or caretaking burdens. Influenza may also trigger inattention to household financial management and a lack of planning for future bill payments (9)(10)(11). This may be especially problematic for borrowers who are already behind on their payments, whom we define as vulnerable borrowers. ...
We examined the association between influenza outbreaks in 83 metropolitan areas and credit card and mortgage defaults, as measured in quarterly zip code-level credit data over the period of 2004 to 2012.
We used ordinary least squares, fixed effects, and 2-stage least squares instrumental variables regression strategies to examine the relationship between influenza-related Google searches and 30-, 60-, and 90-day credit card and mortgage delinquency rates.
We found that a proxy for influenza outbreaks is associated with a small but statistically significant increase in credit card and mortgage default rates, net of other factors. These effects are largest for 90-day defaults, suggesting that influenza outbreaks have a disproportionate impact on vulnerable borrowers who are already behind on their payments.
Overall, it appears there is a relationship between exogenous health shocks (such as influenza) and credit default. The results suggest that consumer finances could benefit from policies that aim to reduce the financial shocks of illness, particularly for vulnerable borrowers. (Am J Public Health. Published online ahead of print July 16, 2015: e1-e6. doi:10.2105/AJPH.2015.302671).
... Psychological research on the prediction of task duration has mostly focused on prediction bias, the so-called planning fallacy, a general tendency to underestimate task completion times (Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010;Halkjelsvik & Jørgensen, 2012;Roy, Christenfeld, & McKenzie, 2005). The prediction bias occurs when people estimate how long it will take them to complete academic tasks (e.g., Buehler, Griffin, & Ross, 1994) but also with regard to everyday activities (Byram, 1997). ...
The Model of Action Phases (Gollwitzer, 1990, 2012) distinguishes an implemental mindset evoked by planning goal-directed actions, from a deliberative mindset evoked by pondering pros/cons of adopting a particular goal. The present research demonstrates that mindsets affect time predictions. In Study 1 (N = 151), participants in an implemental mindset made shorter time predictions with respect to completing personal goals than participants in a deliberative mindset. In Study 2 (N = 78), we tested a mediating mechanism for the mindset effect by varying the motivation to return a report. The mindset effect was replicated in the low-but not in the high-motivation condition with participants in an implemental mindset returning the report earlier, and being as accurate in their predictions as participants in a deliberative mindset. Results indicate that an implemental (vs. deliberative) mindset increases motivation and therefore leads to shorter, but equally biased time predictions.
... A strategy to reduce the planning fallacy is to ask managers to forecast the completion time, cost, or benefits for a range of comparable projects rather than a single project. This strategy, known as Reference Class Forecasting (Kahneman & Tversky 1977), has been effective in reducing time and cost overruns of large infrastructure projects (Buehler et al. 2010). ...
... A strategy to reduce the planning fallacy is to ask managers to forecast the completion time, cost or benefits for a range of comparable projects rather than a single project. This strategy, known as Reference Class Forecasting (Kahneman and Tversky 1977), has been effective in reducing time and costs overruns of large infrastructure projects (Buehler et al. 2010). ...
Uncertainties about the consequences of natural resource management mean that managers are required to make difficult judgements. However, research in behavioural economics, psychology and behavioural decision theory has shown that people, including managers, are subject to a range of biases in their perceptions and judgements. Based on an interpretative survey of these literatures, we identify particular biases that are likely to impinge on the operation and success of natural resource management. We discuss these in the particular context of adaptive management, an approach that emphasises learning from practical experience to reduce uncertainties. The biases discussed include action bias, the planning fallacy, reliance on limited information, limited reliance on systematic learning, framing effects and reference-point bias. Agencies should be aware of the influence of biases when adaptive management decisions are undertaken. We propose several ways to reduce these biases.
... Construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2003;Liberman & Trope, 2008) predicts that goals associated with high-level "why" construal are perceived to be more important than goals associated with low-level "how" construal. Goals construed at a high-level feel meaningful but are temporally distal, so students do not feel constrained in planning how they will actually attain them (Liberman & Trope, 1998), leading to both lack of preparation and to overly optimistic estimates about the likelihood of distal goal attainment (the planning fallacy, Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010;Gilovich, Kerr, & Medvec, 1993;Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). ...
Students often fail to devote sufficient time to schoolwork even though they value school success. One reason may be they (mis)interpret what experienced difficulty with schoolwork implies because they misgauge their relative standing. To test this prediction we divided students into four guided-recall groups. For half, the recall was a time that they interpreted experienced difficulty with schoolwork as meaning that it was important to succeed and for half the recall was a time that it meant it was impossible to succeed. Students were then led to believe that they had the guided interpretation more or less frequently than others. Students in the difficulty means importance more for oneself than for others and in the difficulty means impossibility less for oneself than for others conditions were more academically engaged (Study 1) and invested more time (Study 2). Investment mattered, influencing performance on a test of fluid intelligence (Study 2).
... Furthermore, future research may investigate how to ensure that memory predictions are better calibrated. Other miscalibrations of future performance such as the planning fallacy (the belief that it takes less time to execute a task than it actually takes; Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010) and the illusion of explanatory depth (the belief that one knows more about how everyday objects work than what one actually knows ;Fernbach, Sloman, Louis, & Shube, 2013), are reduced when participants are induced to process information more diligently to predict their future performance. For example, when asked to provide a mechanistic explanation, people realize that they do not know much about how everyday objects work (Alter, Oppenheimer, & Zemla, 2010). ...
We examine consumers' forgetting to buy items they intended to buy. We show that the propensity to forget depends on the types of items consumers intend to purchase and the way consumers shop. Consumers may shop using a memory-based search by recalling their planned purchases from memory and directly searching for the products. For example, consumers may use the search function at an online store. Alternatively, consumers may use a stimulus-based search by systematically moving through a store, visually scanning the inventory and selecting the required items as they are encountered. Using an online shopping paradigm, we show that consumers are more likely to forget the items they infrequently buy when using the memory-based search, but not when using the stimulus-based search. In fact, when using the stimulus-based search, consumers are sometimes even better able to remember the items they infrequently (vs. frequently) buy. Moreover, consumers fail to take these factors into account when predicting their memory. As a result, they do not take appropriate actions to prevent forgetting (e.g., using a shopping list).
... One of the problems that makes time management (Koch and Kleinmann 2002) so difficult is the planning fallacy: the tendency to underestimate future task duration despite knowing that previous tasks overran (Kahneman and Tversky 1979). Considerable research (e.g., Buehler et al. 1997;Burt and Kemp 1994;Halkjelsvik et al. 2011;König 2005;Roy et al. 2008; Thomas et al. 2004;Weick and Guinote 2010; for recent overviews see Buehler et al. 2010, andJørgensen 2012) has almost universally found that tasks take longer than predicted, and this has been observed on various laboratory and real world tasks including writing college assignments (e.g., Buehler et al. 1994) and shopping for gifts (Kruger and Evans 2004). Such underestimation of task duration may cause serious problems; for example, students may start to work on assignments too late to achieve good grades and gifts bought in the rush may not have the anticipated consequences (see Kruger and Evans 2004). ...
It is a common time management problem that people underestimate the duration of tasks, which has been termed the “planning fallacy.” To overcome this, it has been suggested that people should be informed about how long they previously worked on the same task. This study, however, tests whether previous misestimation also affects the duration estimation of a novel task, even if the feedback is only self-generated. To test this, two groups of participants performed two unrelated, laboratory-based tasks in succession. Learning was manipulated by permitting only the experimental group to retrospectively estimate the duration of the first task before predicting the duration of the second task. Results showed that the experimental group underestimated the duration of the second task less than the control group, which indicates a general kind of learning from previous misestimation. The findings imply that people could be trained to carefully observe how much they misestimate task duration in order to stimulate learning. The findings are discussed in relation to the anchoring account of task duration misestimation and the memory-bias account of the planning fallacy.
... A third, highly relevant systematic bias is difficulty with self-regulation, where people systematically underestimate the time required for tasks (Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010), or fail to take steps in the present to prepare for the future (Fudenberg, Levine, & Maniadis, 2012;Gul & Pesendorfer, 2004). This is also consistent with a hyperbolic discounting model where people fail to engage in planning ahead for their future self-control failures-people overestimate their ability to stick to their financial plan (Ashraf, Karlan, & Yin, 2006). ...
In the wake of the housing crisis in 2008, U.S. policymakers have developed a range of policy proposals to address the risk of mortgage borrowers going into payment default. Some of these proposed regulations would effectively eliminate certain loans with riskier borrower characteristics from the market. Such prescriptive approaches fail to recognize alternatives that permit riskier loans to be made, but require postorigination practices designed to offset elevated default risk by improving the capability of individual borrowers to make timely payments. This study provides evidence of one such approach. Through a randomized field experiment, we test the impact of goal setting and external monitoring on mortgage delinquency. First-time homebuyers who completed a financial planning module and received quarterly contact from a financial coach are less likely to become delinquent or default on their mortgages. These results suggest that relatively low cost procedures embedded into loan servicing may increase adherence to timely repayments, thereby reducing the probability of delinquency while still permitting riskier borrowers to participate in credit markets.
... Managers, policy makers, doctors, professors, students, and many others need to schedule their time, estimate their productivity, and estimate the time that they need to allocate for future tasks. In general, people are often overoptimistic about their future task performance (Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010). Kahneman and Tversky (1982) first termed this phenomenon planning fallacy, which includes elements of self-enhancement bias and positive illusions. ...
Overoptimistic performance prediction is a very common feature of people's goal-directed behavior. In this study we examined overoptimistic prediction as a function of construal level. In construal level theory an explanation is set out with regard to how people make predictions through
the abstract connections between past and future events, with high-level construal bridging near and distant events. We conducted 2 experiments to confirm our hypothesis that, compared with people with local, concrete construals, people with global, abstract construals would make predictions
that were less overoptimistic. In Study 1 we manipulated construal level by priming mindset, and participants (n = 81) predicted the level of their productivity in an anagram task. The results supported our hypothesis. In Study 2, in order to improve the generalizability of the conclusion,
we varied the manipulation of the construal level by priming a scenario, and measured performance prediction by having the participants (n = 119) estimate task duration. The results showed that high-level construal consistently decreased overoptimistic prediction, supporting our hypothesis.
The theoretical implications of our findings are discussed.
... Construal level theory (Trope & Liberman, 2003;Liberman & Trope, 2008) predicts that goals associated with high-level "why" construals are perceived to be more important than goals associated with low-level "how" construals. Goals construed at a high-level feel meaningful but are temporally distal, so students do not feel constrained in planning how they will actually attain them (Liberman & Trope, 1998), leading to both lack of preparation and overly optimistic estimates about the likelihood of distal goal attainment (the planning fallacy, Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010;Gilovich, Kerr, & Medvec, 1993;Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). ...
In order for students to do well in school, they must take action to achieve their academic and career goals. Students may have the strategies necessary to succeed but may not enact them when the time is right because there is no cue that they should act now rather than later, and once they do act, their interpretation of experienced difficulty may derail efforts rather than encourage persistence. In three sets of experiments, I look at ways to frame experiences of un/certainty so that students see now is the time to work toward their academic goals, and ways to frame experiences of difficulty so that it is seen as implying that school success is an important goal. The first set of three experiments tested the prediction that feeling unsure about the path to one???s goals can be motivating if accompanied by the feeling that one has the skills needed to make progress toward one???s goals. Sense of un/certainty about the self and path were separately manipulated in college students. Feeling uncertain about one???s abilities reduced the salience of academic and career future identities, but feeling certain about those abilities did not motivate action unless combined with a sense of uncertainty about the path as well. This combination increased planned study hours and actual goal-focused action, working on a resume builder instead of playing games. In the second set of three experiments, I provided children in school an interpretation of difficulty as signaling task importance; these students subsequently generated more school-focused future identities and strategies to attain them, and performed better on standardized intelligence and writing tasks. Children provided no interpretation of difficulty or an interpretation of difficulty as signaling impossibility of task success did not differ from each other in performance. The final two experiments provided students an interpretation of difficulty and assigned them to conditions implying they experienced difficulty as importance relatively more than others or that they experienced difficulty as impossibility relatively less than others. These students viewed investment in academics as more identity-congruent, planned to study more, and invested more time on a difficult task.
... For example, a well-known memory bias of predictive estimation is the planning fallacy, first introduced by Kahneman and Tversky (1979). This fallacy refers to the tendency for people to underestimate how long a project will take to complete, even though they know that past similar projects have taken longer to complete than planned (Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010). Rather than memory for prior similar tasks being ignored while generating predictions, previous task information might be instead misremembered (Roy et al., 2005). ...
... Psychological reasons refer to cognitive biases that can unintentionally lead people to make estimates that are over-optimistic. There are various psychological reasons for poor software estimates (see, for example, Buehler et al., 2010;Jørgensen & Moløkken-Østvold, 2004;Halkjelsvik & Jørgensen, 2012), amongst which the planning fallacy Kutsch et al., 2011) is the most well known. ...
Many Information Systems (IS) projects fail to be completed within budget and on schedule. A contributing factor is the so-called planning fallacy in which people tend to underestimate the resources required to complete a project. In this paper, we propose that signals of the planning fallacy can be detected in a project’s business case. We investigated whether language usage in business cases can serve as an early warning signal for overruns in IS projects. Drawing on two theoretical perspectives – the Linguistic Category Model (LCM) and Construal Level Theory (CLT) – two sets of rival hypotheses were tested concerning the relationship between project overruns and whether the language usage in a business case is abstract or concrete. A linguistic analysis of the business cases of large IS projects in the Netherlands suggests that concrete language usage in the business case is associated with bigger budget and schedule overruns. For researchers, our study contributes to the existing literature on the importance of language usage. For practitioners, our study provides an early warning indicator for overruns.
... Este es la presencia, durante todo el proceso del censo o durante algunas etapas específicas, de un conjunto de decisiones incorrectas ocasionadas por sesgos cognitivos que implican un optimismo excesivo respecto a los tiempos necesarios para completar las diferentes etapas del censo, a los recursos financieros y humanos requeridos para finalizarlas y a la cobertura y confiabilidad de los datos a ser producidos. Estos problemas corresponden a la llamada falacia de la planificación (ver Buehler, Griffin y MacDonald, 1997;Buehler, Griffin y Peetz, 2010;Lovallo y Kahneman, 2003;Weick y Guinote, 2010). ...
La realización exitosa de un censo de población y vivienda no es simple ya que, debido al hecho de ser una acción de gran envergadura, enfrenta numerosas trabas y barreras, por lo cual pueden presentarse muchas posibilidades de errores. Es frecuente que la mayoría de estos no provengan de falta de capacidades técnicas, sino de decisiones erróneas resultantes de sesgos cognitivos que inducen a una confianza excesiva respecto a los tiempos necesarios para completar las diferentes etapas del censo, a los recursos financieros y humanos requeridos para finalizarlas y a la cobertura y confiabilidad de los datos a ser producidos. Estas decisiones equivocadas corresponden a la llamada falacia de la planificación. Existen diversos manuales y textos sobre la realización y administración de censos así como bastante experiencia acumulada. Sin embargo, los posibles errores que provienen de la mencionada falacia no han sido analizados. El objetivo de este trabajo es analizar cómo uno de los mecanismos de la falacia de la planificación es capaz de generar errores graves en los censos. Esto se ilustra con el caso de Chile, donde el censo de 2012 tuvo serios problemas. Se propone que muchos de los errores que afectaron este censo tienen su origen en sesgos cognitivos que intervinieron en procesos administrativos, metodológicos y técnicos.
... In support, reviews of studies in the time estimation literature indicate that most estimates of past task duration in general are inaccurate and easily biased (Wallace and Rabin, 1960;Fraisse, 1963;Ornstein, 1969;Poynter, 1989;Block and Zakay, 1997;Roy et al., 2005;Buehler et al., 2010;Halkjelsvik and Jørgensen, 2012). For example, task characteristics, such as whether the task is relatively short or long, can influence bias, with shorter tasks tending be overestimated and longer tasks tending to be underestimated (Bird, 1927;Yarmey, 2000;Lejeune and Wearden, 2009;Tobin and Grondin, 2009). ...
The present study sought to determine whether witness memory for duration could be improved. In three studies, we examined the effects of unpacking (breaking an event into its component parts), anchoring (supplying participants with a reference duration), and summation (summing component estimates). Participants watched a video-recorded mock crime and provided duration estimates for components of the crime (e.g., casing the car, unlocking the door, etc.) and for the total crime. Results indicate that bias in estimated duration was less for the sum of the parts than it was for the overall duration estimate. Further, the sum of the individual parts did not equal the total estimate, even though all estimates were given in sequence. Summing the component parts could be a more successful intervention than anchoring or unpacking and is easy to employ with witnesses.
... While several psychological mechanisms have been used to explain the planning fallacy (Buehler and Griffin, 2015), the main cognitive model is the inside and outside view proposed by Kahneman and Tversky (1979). The inside view focuses on singular information such as the details of the focal task, while the outside view focuses on distributional information such as how the current task fits into the set of related tasks (Buehler, Griffin and Peetz, 2010). In this model, the inside view is expected to lead to time underestimation whereas the outside view is expected to lead to more realistic, yet still imperfect, estimates (Kahneman and Lovallo, 1993). ...
One of the primary reasons for using agile software development (ASD) methods is to be agile – to deliver working software quickly. Unfortunately, this pressure often encourages ASD practitioners to make long-term trade-offs for short-term gains (i.e., to accumulate technical debt). Technical debt is a real and significant business challenge. Indeed, a recent study provides a conservative estimate of $361,000 of technical debt for every 100,000 lines of code. In this study, I examine the impact of the planning fallacy – people’s tendency to underestimate the time required to complete a project, even when they have considerable experience of past failures to live up to planned schedules – on the accumulation of technical debt in ASD projects. Using an experiment, I seek to establish a causal relationship between the planning fallacy and technical debt and to demonstrate that solutions to the planning fallacy can be leveraged to manage technical debt in ASD projects.
... For example, using scores on the short version of the Dundee Stress State Questionnaire (DSSQ; Matthews et al., 2002), which assesses subjective experience in task performance situations, Matthews et al. (2002) found higher distress, lower worry and some increase in task engagement was evident for tasks involving working memory (e.g., mental arithmetic), whereas for tasks involving vigilance (e.g., watching images), which are less mentally demanding, lower worry, lower task engagement, and some distress was evident. Such research has potentially important implications for the field of task duration prediction as support for the planning fallacy (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979) and temporal misestimation in general has been observed on a diverse range of tasks (see Buehler et al., 2010a, for a review), which are highly unlikely to be uniform in terms of the mental demands they place on the people performing them. Thus, examining the interplay between task type and individual differences in task engagement and stress state would provide a welcome addition to the task duration prediction literature. ...
Bias in predictions of task duration has been attributed to misremembering previous task duration and using previous task duration as a basis for predictions. This research sought to further examine how previous task information affects prediction bias by manipulating task similarity and assessing the role of previous task duration feedback. Task similarity was examined through participants performing two tasks 1 week apart that were the same or different. Duration feedback was provided to all participants (Experiment 1), its recall was manipulated (Experiment 2), and its provision was manipulated (Experiment 3). In all experiments, task similarity influenced bias on the second task, with predictions being less biased when the first task was the same task. However, duration feedback did not influence bias. The findings highlight the pivotal role of knowledge about previous tasks in task duration prediction and are discussed in relation to the theoretical accounts of task duration prediction bias.
... For example, one way in which organizations get themselves into trouble is by overestimating their future rate of production and therefore over-promising (Flyvbjerg, Bruzelius, & Rothengatter, 2003;Staats, Milkman, & Fox, 2012). Evidence seems to suggest that teams are rarely effective at eliminating this "planning fallacy" (Buehler & Griffin, 2015) and working in teams may even exacerbate overestimation (Buehler, Messervey, & Griffin, 2005). Accountability to peers and supervisors, which we described as one way to reduce overconfidence and extreme, unreasonable views, also can backfire. ...
This review considers the role of overconfidence in organizational life, focusing on ways in which individual-level overconfidence manifests in organizations. The research reviewed offers a pessimistic assessment of the efficacy of either debiasing tools or organizational correctives, and identifies some important ways in which organizational dynamics are likely to exacerbate overconfidence among individuals. The organizational consequences of overconfidence can be substantial, especially when it comes from those at the top of the organization. However, there are also reasons to suspect that the research literature exaggerates the prevalence of overconfidence.
... Apart from expectations about events, comparative optimism also characterizes behavioral expectations in that most people believe that they are more likely to perform morally desirable actions in the future than others are. The planning fallacy, implying that people underestimate the time they will need to complete projects (Buehler et al., 2010), may be view as an example of over-optimism and comparative optimism at the same time. People indeed underestimate the time they will need to complete projects but do not (or to a lesser extent) underestimate the time other people will need to complete their projects. ...
This chapter discusses various types of optimism biases and the causes of those biases. It suggests that the field sorely needs more consistency in its use of terms related to optimism biases. The chapter discusses definitions for relevant terms and identify key features of various forms of bias. It also provides a framework for understanding relations among those terms and effects. Then, the chapter talks about optimism in studies involving self-other comparisons, isolating a subset of optimism biases (unrealistic-optimism, better-than-average, and shared-circumstance effects). Finally, the chapter elucidates classic and recent findings from another subset of studies, namely those on the desirability bias. This is the subset of studies that are designed for, and relevant to, testing the question of whether outcome desirability has a biasing influence on expectations about that outcome. The chapter also mentions four types of accounts for self-other overoptimism.
Electronic auctions create a complex decision environment, in which bidders have to submit their bids based on very limited information that they receive as feedback from the auction platform. We argue that the amount of such feedback information, the form in which it is presented, and the context in which this transfer takes place all might influence the way the information is processed, and the decisions that result from receiving this information. The impact of these variables also depends on individual characteristics of the bidders such as their cognitive style. We present an empirical study based on two experiments in which we analyze the impact of these variables on decision outcomes. Results indicate that providing more feedback information can indeed lead to more aggressive (and less rational) bidding behavior and that the framing of information (e.g. whether subjects are told that they ‘won’ or ‘lost’ an auction, or they receive bid data) also strongly influences behavior. There are also significant interactions with individual characteristics, so we conclude that it is necessary to tailor auction platforms specifically to the characteristics of individual bidders.
Optimism is essential when initiating transformation programs. Without it, they lack vision and momentum. Yet when left unchecked, optimism bias leads to divergence of ambition and reality. Transformation programs are doomed to disappoint the stakeholders and operators. Calibrating optimism and realism is critical. Stakeholders must first understand and recognize optimism bias in themselves and the system they are seeing to change. Failure to do so is failure to learn and evolve, leading to stagnation and transformation failure. As all transformation has a fundamental element of culture/behavior change, developing a people and leadership strategy that underpins the transformation is essential. The author will offer a practical toolkit for developing the strategy and ensuring successful implementation. This chapter will examine the causes and impact of optimism bias in megaprojects context and establish the application of the theory in the transformation program context. It will then set out a toolkit for strategic change that draws upon behavioral insights to de-risk the operational phase. Thus enabling senior stakeholders and operators to ensure the transformation drifts toward a mutually satisfactory conclusion.
Im vorangegangenen Kapitel haben wir uns mit Entscheidungen und Zukunft beschäftigt. Der Brückenschlag gelingt durch die Prognose, sie ist der Schlüssel zu „guten“ Entscheidungen. Aber wie funktioniert sie, vor allem im Falle von Alltagsentscheidungen, wenn der Aufwand einer komplexen Vorhersagemethodik nicht lohnt? Worauf ist zu achten, um die eigene Zukunft, soweit es eben geht, abzusichern oder zumindest zu verstehen, wie groß die Unsicherheit ist? Welche Fehler können dabei gemacht werden?
Defense acquisition programs, which had their initial inception in the 1970s, performed exceptionally well by many measures. The management of acquisitions during this period is examined in detail by means of case studies, and contrasted with earlier and later periods, to identify key factors and formulate promising policy initiatives. Previous findings about the crucial importance of decisions in the very earliest conceptual phase are strongly confirmed and success is shown to have very often hinged on effective intervention by the Director of Defense Research and Engineering (DDR&E) even before the equivalent of today's Materiel Development Decision. Factors in DDR&E's successes included a focus on the intersection of technology and military need, DDR&E's background of institutional success and the prestige and credibility it established, a compact and highly capable staff, a strong culture of objectivity and absence of either pessimistic or optimistic bias, excellent internal and external communications, a very sharp focus on things that made a real difference, and close meshing with the top management of the Department of Defense and its priorities. Finally, ways that these lessons could be effectively applied in today's environment are explored.
According to the self-consistency model (Koriat, 2012a), confidence judgments in the responses to 2-alternative forced-choice items are correlated with the consensuality of the responses rather than with their correctness: For consensually correct (CC) items, for which the majority response is correct, accuracy is higher for the correct answer than for the wrong answer, whereas for consensually wrong items (CW), confidence is higher for the wrong answer. Assuming that group decisions are dominated by the more confident members, a maximum confidence slating (MCS) algorithm that was applied to virtual dyads outperformed the better member for CC items, but yielded worse performance than the worse member for CW items (Koriat, 2012b). We examined whether group deliberation also amplifies the tendencies that are exhibited by individual decisions, or rather improves performance for both CC and CW items. A perceptual task and a general-information task yielded very similar results. MCS applied to the individual decisions yielded a similar amplification as in Koriat (2012b), but dyadic interaction accentuated this amplification further. Thus, group deliberation had an added effect over confidence-based judgments, possibly due to the exchange of arguments within a dyad, but both confidence slating and group deliberation affected performance in the same direction, improving accuracy when individual accuracy was better than chance, but impairing it when individual accuracy was below chance. Notably, for CW items, group interaction not only impaired accuracy but also enhanced confidence in the erroneous decisions. The mechanisms underlying consensual amplifications were discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record
(c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).
Across cultures and throughout history, gift giving has played a fundamental role in human interaction. Gifting is deeply embedded in our cultural conception of social norms and values. Stories and acts of gift giving help us understand ourselves with regard to our cultural ideals (e.g., the Statue of Liberty given by France defined America's values around immigration), religious beliefs (e.g., the Three Magi gave gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh to Jesus), and our own aspirations (e.g., in the classic Wizard of Oz, the “Wizard's” gifts emphasized valued personal characteristics – a medal for courage for the Lion, a diploma for knowledge for the Scarecrow, and a heart for the Tin Man). Thus, the symbolic meaning and social value of a gift can far exceed its mere physical attributes and monetary worth.Gift exchange is an intrinsic element in maintaining cultural cohesiveness. It enables givers to define and strengthen their bonds with recipients via the choice of gifts that express their point of view on the relationship, the recipient, and the gift occasion. Much of the extant literature on gifting has studied the idiosyncratic set of practices and norms intended to preserve social bonds within a framework of ritualized occasions, such as birthdays or Christmas. Such research has examined how gifting provides relationship maintenance rites such as reciprocity and expressions of appreciation (Cheal, 1988) and reinforces established relationships (Bourdieu, 1977, 1986). Prior research further suggests that the rationale for gifting is that a prescribed cycle of reciprocal gift exchanges establishes predictable transactions between individuals (Sherry, 1983), thus ensuring that important relationships are regularly reaffirmed.Although gifting may largely be thought of as a strategically engineered process, givers and recipients alike are deeply invested in the process of gift exchange. Givers often experience strong feelings of anxiety and excitement in anticipation of presenting a gift to the recipient (Wooten, 2000). Furthermore, one's response to the gift selected is as important as the gift itself, and recipients often regulate their responses to the gift in order to preserve close relational ties. Given the importance of appropriately responding to a gift, society strictly regulates the process of giving and receiving.
Many products marketed in the United States and around the world can cause harm to consumers if misused. Of even greater concern, some products, such as combustible tobacco, can be inherently harmful to consumers even when used as intended (CDC, 2014a). Since the emergence of the modern-day Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the 1930s, the U.S. government has enacted legislation and regulations that help to protect consumers through information disclosures and/or warnings to identify potential risks. Laws and regulations involving consumer protection are directly related to the provision of objective and truthful information to consumers and how they, in turn, utilize this information. These laws are designed to prevent organizations from engaging in deceptive or unfair business practices and to help protect the rights of consumers. For example, in the United States, agencies such as the FDA, FTC, Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), Federal Communications Commission (FCC), and others establish and enforce regulations that help to protect consumers. As part of this regulation, agencies often require marketers to provide disclosures or warnings on packaging or at the point of purchase, particularly for products in which safety or public health is an issue, such as for food, tobacco, and prescription drugs.Federal agencies make decisions regarding whether or not a warning or disclosure is appropriate and how such information should be presented to consumers. To make these decisions, agencies require a clear understanding of how consumers acquire, process, and use warning and/or disclosure information. Furthermore, federal agencies take into account consumers’ initial beliefs and knowledge regarding the product, potential individual differences among consumers, economic costs and benefits, and situational moderators.at any point in time, agencies may be deluged with hundreds of current or emerging questions that present opportunities for consumer research. However, due to time and resource constraints, existing regulations and court decisions, and filing requirements for new regulations (e.g., Office of Management and Budget; Federal Register posting), the federal agencies are only able to address a small fraction of these questions and issues that often have important implications for consumer health and well-being. This situation therefore creates both an important need and rich opportunity for consumer researchers. In this chapter, we first introduce conceptual frameworks for the study of warnings and disclosures. We also review recent research on critical topical domains.
Expectations are beliefs about something that will occur or that will be revealed in the future. They may be based on personal experience, information transmitted by others, cognitive construction or heuristic thinking. Expectations play a role in learning, motivation, decision making, affective responding and forecasting, and social interactions. Even though they show a variety of biases expectations often incorrectly appear to be accurate. One reason for the overestimation of the validity of expectations is that they affect the identification and evaluation of behaviors and events, as well as causal reasoning, memory, and interpersonal communication. Moreover, expectations may affect behaviors in such a manner that they make themselves come true or, less frequently, falsify themselves.
未来任务时间估计是指人们凭借记忆和经验对将要进行的任务所需要的时间进行判断的过程。人们对未来任务的时间估计会产生偏差，对其心理机制的解释主要包括计划谬误理论、记忆偏差理论和解释水平理论。任务性质(包括任务持续时间的长短、任务的复杂度和任务熟悉度等)会对未来任务的时间估计产生影响，各理论从不同角度阐释了任务性质对未来任务的时间估计的影响。未来研究需进一步探索任务性质与人格特质在影响未来任务时间估计背后的关系以及未来任务时间估计的脑机制。 The estimation of task duration in the future refers to the process of judging the time taken to complete a task in the future with memory and experience. The estimation is biased, which has been mainly explained by planning fallacy theory, memory biased theory and construal level theory in the aspect of psychological mechanism. Task characters including task duration, task complexity and task familiarity has effects on the process, which has also been expounded by these three theories from different sides. The focus of future research should involve the relationship between task characters and personality traits in the process and the brain mechanism throughout the process.The estimation of task duration in the future refers to the process of judging the time taken to complete a task in the future with memory and experience. The estimation is biased, which has been mainly explained by planning fallacy theory, memory biased theory and construal level theory in the aspect of psychological mechanism. Task characters including task duration, task complexity and task familiarity have effects on the process, which have also been expounded by these three theories from different sides. The focus of future research should involve the relationship between task characters and personality traits in the process and the brain mechanism throughout the process.
As globalization increases, the world is becoming smaller and the consciousness of the world as a whole is intensifying rapidly. With the rapid growth of global linkages and global consciousness, the marketplace is also growing in cultural diversity both in terms of the demand side (i.e., consumer markets) and the supply side (i.e., brand offerings). Increased cultural diversity in the demand side of the market is fueled by the emergence of a robust middle class in emerging economies (such as those of China, Russia, Brazil, and India), the immigration patterns changing the cultural landscape of developed markets (e.g., growth of Hispanics in the United States or that of Muslim populations in Europe), and the increased cultural curiosity of worldwide consumers thanks to Internet connectivity, social media platforms, and global travel. The supply side of the market is witnessing the emergence of global brands from every corner of the developed and developing world. Specifically, the last decade has witnessed a tremendous growth in the number of new American and European brands successfully establishing a global presence in emerging markets. For instance, one may consider the American brand Jack Daniel's success in China and Europe, which has helped the company to sell more whiskey abroad than in the United States (Kiley, 2007). Or consider the high-stakes expansion of Spanish phone company Telefónica into Latin America, which has been instrumental for helping the company become the largest telecommunications company in Europe (O'Brien, 2012). More importantly, brands from emerging markets have also recently emerged as global challengers. Consider, for example, the leadership position achieved in recent years by Chinese Lenovo Group in the personal computer industry, overtaking competitors Hewlett-Packard and Dell in worldwide sales (Hachman, 2014), the recent entry of India's Tata Group into the luxury cars segment via the acquisition of the Jaguar and Land Rover brands, or the growth of Brazilian's Embraer in the Western-dominated aerospace industry. As a result of these global market trends, a wide range of brands bring a variety of cultures to a consumer population that is also growing culturally diverse.
Introduction In 2004, the journal Neuron published a paper titled “ Neural Correlates of Behavioral Preferences for Culturally Familiar Drinks.” But the work was already generating significant buzz under the somewhat less scientific title of “ the Coke-Pepsi study.” Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the authors had examined how various areas in the brain reacted to the experience of drinking cola with or without the knowledge of its brand name. Unexpectedly, their results suggested that people have a more complex cognitive interaction with Coke's branding than with Pepsi's (McClure et al., 2004). By finding evidence for brand-dependent neural activity, they also found evidence that neuroscientific methods could offer useful insights about how consumers think.Since that paper, consumer neuroscience research – which applies tools and theories from neuroscience to better understand decision making and related processes – has generated quite a bit of excitement in marketing and in neighboring disciplines.
What has consumer research taught us about how to make our lives better? By “better,” we mean according to us consumers, in terms of how happy we feel in our lives and with the choices we make: our subjective sense of well-being. Having surveyed the research, it is our pleasure to report that over the past ten years, consumer research has taught us quite a lot in terms of things we can do, choices we can make, and ways that we can think to increase our happiness. Still, for as much as we have learned, there is even more yet to learn, which makes consumer happiness a ripe topic for future research.We can attribute much of the impetus for consumer happiness research to two sources: Martin Seligman's American Psychological Association Presidential Address in 1998 and David Mick's Association of Consumer Research Presidential Address in 2005. Both of these speeches implored their respective fields, Seligman's psychology and Mick's consumer research, to shift the research agenda toward improving subjective well-being. In Seligman's 1998 address, he redefined the mission of psychology to “making the lives of all people better,” and in doing so carved out the subfield known as Positive Psychology: “a science and profession whose aim is the building of what makes life most worth living.” In Mick's 2005 address, he suggested that the field should pursue “investigations that are framed by a fundamental problem or opportunity, and that strive to respect, uphold, and improve life in relation to the myriad conditions, demands, potentialities, and effects of consumption,” terming this pursuit “transformative consumer research.” This chapter reviews research over the past decade that heeded these urgings and sought to transform consumers’ lives by increasing their happiness and well-being. This research has typically taken one of two approaches: investigating the happiness consumers feel in their lives at a broad level, or investigating the happiness consumers feel with respect to more specific consumption episodes. The chapter is organized as such. To begin our review, since consumption typically relies on the expenditure of either or both of our two fundamental resources – money and time – we first discuss research (including some of our own) that relates these resources to happiness in general.
The current World facing a range of environmental, social, and economic challenges over the next decades. Nonetheless, as the problems are deeply intertwined, the only way for policymakers to save the global economy from falling into a dangerous downward spiral is to take concerted action, giving greater priority to revitalizing the recovery in output and employment in the short run in order to pave more solid ground for enacting the structural reforms required for sustainable and balanced growth over the medium and long run.
What it is so difficult to obtain in most of the countries, that politicians and public bodies they apply competences and manage his governments as projects, programmes and project portfolios too?. Political divides over how to tackle these problems are impeding needed, much stronger policy action, further eroding the already shattered confidence of business and consumers.
PPPmgnt is a substantial part of the corporate government. Corporate governance involves a set of relationships between a company’s management, its board, its shareholders and other stakeholders. Corporate governance also provides the structure through which the objectives of the company are set, and the means of attaining those objectives and monitoring performance are determined (OECD, 2004).
The governance of project management concerns those areas of corporate governance that are specifically related to project activities. Effective governance of project management ensures that an organization’s project portfolio is aligned to the organization’s objectives, is delivered efficiently and is sustainable. Governance of project management also supports the means by which the board and other major project stakeholders exchange timely, relevant and reliable information (APM, 2011).
Consumer researchers have often pondered the relevance of the research published in the field (Pham, 2013; Sheth, 1982). This concern is exemplified by the recent remarks of the editors of the Journal of Consumer Research: “We encourage the authors to ‘make it meaningful’ by being specific about the relevance of their work to particular audiences, including but not limited to fellow academics” (Dahl, Fischer, Johar, & Morwitz, 2014, p. iii). This chapter therefore begins with a simple but important question: Why should we care about consumer emotions? In other words, are consumer emotions relevant to our understanding of consumer psychology? Why Consumer Emotions Matter: Prevalence and Power The answer to the preceding question is a resounding “yes,” for two main reasons: prevalence and power. Emotions are ubiquitous in consumer-related contexts. Companies systematically try to induce emotional reactions in consumers through incidental (e.g., store ambience; Kaltcheva & Weitz, 2006) and integral (e.g., brands; Thomson, MacInnis, & Park, 2005) sources. Additionally, positive and negative emotions are present at every step of the consumer behavior cycle, from search (Teixeira, Wedel, & Pieters, 2012), to evaluation (Holbrook & Batra, 1987), to choice (Luce, Payne, & Bettman, 1999), to consumption (Chan, van Boven, Andrade, & Ariely, 2013), and finally, to disposal (Grasmick, Bursik, & Kinsey, 1991). Emotions are not only prevalent but also powerful. For instance, in comparing reason-based and feeling-based evaluations of advertising material, Pham, Cohen, Pracejus, and Hughes (2001) found that feeling-based evaluations produced faster and more consistent judgments and that they were better predictors of the number and valence of thoughts about the target. Feeling-based assessments have also been shown to override (a) the impact of magnitude (e.g., number of items) on evaluations (Hsee & Rottenstreich, 2004), (b) the impact of cognitive assessments on risky decisions (Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001), and (c) the long-term benefits of a given option (Hoch & Loewenstein, 1991; Van den Bergh, Dewitte, & Warlop, 2008). A critic might argue that most studies on the role of emotions in consumer behavior have addressed relatively inconsequential decisions. If the consequences of the decisions increase, the impact of emotions may fade. This argument can be challenged on empirical and logical grounds. First, many daily consumer choices are of little consequence in the short term (e.g., how frequently do we buy a bottle of water vs. a house.
Warum werden bei vielen, vor allen Dingen großen Projekten, die ursprünglichen Planungen nicht eingehalten? Werden Investoren oder private Auftraggeber systematisch durch eine Projektmanagementmafia hereingelegt? Oder erliegen die Planer immer den gleichen selbstschädigenden und projektgefährdenden Denkfehlern?
People frequently underestimate the time needed to complete tasks and we examined a strategy – known as backward planning – that may counteract this optimistic bias. Backward planning involves starting a plan at the end goal and then working through required steps in reverse-chronological order, and is commonly advocated by practitioners as a tool for developing realistic plans and projections. We conducted four experiments to test effects on completion time predictions and related cognitive processes. Participants planned for a task in one of three directions (backward, forward, or unspecified) and predicted when it would be finished. As hypothesized, predicted completion times were longer (Studies 1–4) and thus less biased (Study 4) in the backward condition than in the forward and unspecified conditions. Process measures suggested that backward planning may increase attention to situational factors that delay progress (e.g., obstacles, interruptions, competing demands), elicit novel planning insights, and alter the conceptualization of time. © 2016. The authors license this article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Interpersonal communication is an integral part of everyday life. People swap stories with their friends, share information with their neighbors, and gossip with their co-workers around the water cooler. Consumers recommend new movies, complain about bad products, and suggest vacation destinations they think others will enjoy.The person-to-person sharing of thoughts, opinions, information, news, and other content can be described as word of mouth. Broadly speaking, word of mouth is the informal communication between people about all sorts of goods, services, and ideas. It includes discussions of products (e.g., sneakers), brands (e.g., Nike), political candidates, ideas (e.g., environmental reform), and behaviors (e.g., smoking). It includes direct recommendations (e.g., “You should try this restaurant”) and mere mentions (e.g., “We went to this restaurant for lunch”).Word of mouth is not just frequent, it is also important. What others talk about and share has a big impact on consumer behavior. Research finds that social talk shapes everything from where people eat (Godes & Mayzlin, 2009) and what consumers read (Chevalier & Mayzlin, 2006) to the drugs doctors prescribe (Iyengar, Van den Bulte, & Valente, 2010). McKinsey and Company (Iyengar, Van den Bulte, & Valente, 2010) argues that “word of mouth is the primary factor behind 20 to 50 percent of all purchasing decisions.” While interpersonal communication has been around for thousands of years, the rise of social media has focused even more attention on this area. Rather than just talking to one person over coffee, consumers can now share their thoughts with thousands of others in a matter of seconds. People can tweet, post, like, and share all sorts of opinions and information whenever they feel so inclined. Technology has accelerated the pace of communication and made it faster and easier to share with a large number of people very quickly. The fact that social media conversations leave a written record has also encouraged companies to realize the importance and power of interpersonal communication, causing many organizations to make word of mouth a key part of marketing strategy.This chapter provides an overview of recent research on word of mouth and interpersonal communication. First, I provide a simple framework that is useful for organizing much of the research in the area. Then, after reviewing relevant work in each part of the framework, I sketch out some potential directions for future research.
Principles of Forecasting: A Handbook for Researchers and Practitioners summarizes knowledge from experts and from empirical studies. It provides guidelines that can be applied in fields such as economics, sociology, and psychology. It applies to problems such as those in finance (How much is this company worth?), marketing (Will a new product be successful?), personnel (How can we identify the best job candidates?), and production (What level of inventories should be kept?).
The book is edited by Professor J. Scott Armstrong of the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania. Contributions were written by 40 leading experts in forecasting, and the 30 chapters cover all types of forecasting methods. There are judgmental methods such as Delphi, role-playing, and intentions studies. Quantitative methods include econometric methods, expert systems, and extrapolation. Some methods, such as conjoint analysis, analogies, and rule-based forecasting, integrate quantitative and judgmental procedures. In each area, the authors identify what is known in the form of `if-then principles', and they summarize evidence on these principles.
The project, developed over a four-year period, represents the first book to summarize all that is known about forecasting and to present it so that it can be used by researchers and practitioners. To ensure that the principles are correct, the authors reviewed one another's papers. In addition, external reviews were provided by more than 120 experts, some of whom reviewed many of the papers. The book includes the first comprehensive forecasting dictionary.
Presents an integrative theoretical framework to explain and to predict psychological changes achieved by different modes of treatment. This theory states that psychological procedures, whatever their form, alter the level and strength of self-efficacy. It is hypothesized that expectations of personal efficacy determine whether coping behavior will be initiated, how much effort will be expended, and how long it will be sustained in the face of obstacles and aversive experiences. Persistence in activities that are subjectively threatening but in fact relatively safe produces, through experiences of mastery, further enhancement of self-efficacy and corresponding reductions in defensive behavior. In the proposed model, expectations of personal efficacy are derived from 4 principal sources of information: performance accomplishments, vicarious experience, verbal persuasion, and physiological states. Factors influencing the cognitive processing of efficacy information arise from enactive, vicarious, exhortative, and emotive sources. The differential power of diverse therapeutic procedures is analyzed in terms of the postulated cognitive mechanism of operation. Findings are reported from microanalyses of enactive, vicarious, and emotive modes of treatment that support the hypothesized relationship between perceived self-efficacy and behavioral changes. (21/2 p ref)
This study tested the hypothesis that group discussion moderates the tendency of attributors to underuse consensus information. In Study 1, high- or low-consensus information was associated with a description of a target person's behavior for 259 male and female Ss. Before rendering attributions, Ss spent 7 min either engaging in a group discussion, thinking about their judgment, or perusing attribution responses made by other Ss. Only the participants in the group-discussion conditions were affected by the consensus information. Three additional studies used procedures similar to those used by A. Vinokur and E. Burnstein (see record 1974-25207-001) to test a persuasive-arguments explanation of this group-discussion effect. The findings of these studies supported this view.
"Over budget, over time, over and over again" appears to be an appropriate slogan for large, complex infrastructure projects. This article explains why cost, benefits, and time forecasts for such projects are systematically over-optimistic in the planning phase. The underlying reasons for forecasting errors are grouped into three categories: delusions or honest mistakes; deceptions or strategic manipulation of information or processes; or bad luck. Delusion and deception have each been addressed in the management literature before, but here they are jointly considered for the first time. They are specifically applied to infrastructure problems in a manner that allows both academics and practitioners to understand and implement the suggested corrective procedures. The article provides a framework for analyzing the relative explanatory power of delusion and deception. It also suggests a simplified framework for analyzing the complex principal-agent relationships that are involved in the approval and construction of large infrastructure projects, which can be used to improve forecasts. Finally, the article illustrates reference class forecasting, an outside view de-biasing technique that has proven successful in overcoming both delusion and deception in private and public investment decisions.
82 female undergraduates were assigned to 1 of 4 experimental groups--predict-request, information-request, predict only, and request only--in which requested tasks involved writing a counterattitudinal essay or singing over the telephone. In 3 experiments, Ss overpredicted the degree to which their behavior would be socially desirable and these errors of prediction proved to be self-erasing. Having mispredicted a given behavior, Ss were likely to have these predictions confirmed in later behavior, indicating that prediction of a behavioral sequence evokes a specific cognitive representation of that sequence which is subsequently accessed. Results demonstrate the strong effects on behavior of engaging in prebehavioral cognitive work. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2006 APA, all rights reserved).
A ubiquitous finding in research on human judgment is that people are overconfident about their true predictive abilities. The goal of this study was to understand why overconfidence arises and how it can be reduced to improve the accuracy of predictions about future personal events. Subjects made predictions about the results of their job search efforts 9 months away (e.g., starting salary); all of the events involved positive outcomes, where unrealistic optimism was expected. These events were constructed to vary in their underlying base rate of occurrence. Some subjects generated pro and/or con reasons concerning event occurrence before making their predictions. At low- to moderate-base rates, predictive accuracy increased when subjects generated a con reason. However, at high-base rates (events that occurred for a majority of the subjects), con reason generation had no effect on accuracy-all subjects were more accurate in predicting these events. Generation of pro reasons had no effect on accuracy, suggesting that subjects may have automatically generated supportive reasons as a by-product of the question-answering process. A substantive analysis of the reasons indicated that subjects attributed pro reasons to internal factors and con reasons to external factors. Moreover, subjects who generated internal pro reasons were less accurate than subjects generating external pro or either type of con reason.
Results from the first statistically significant study of the causes of cost escalation in transport infrastructure projects are presented. The study is based on a sample of 258 rail, bridge, tunnel and road projects worth US$90 billion. The focus is on the dependence of cost escalation on (1) length of project implementation phase, (2) size of project and (3) type of project ownership. First, it is found with very high statistical significance that cost escalation is strongly dependent on length of implementation phase. The policy implications are clear: Decision makers and planners should be highly concerned about delays and long implementation phases because they translate into risks of substantial cost escalations. Second, it is found that projects have grown larger over time and that for bridges and tunnels larger projects have larger percentage cost escalations. Finally, by comparing cost escalation for three types of project ownership--private, state-owned enterprise and other public ownership--it is shown that the oft-seen claim that public ownership is problematic and private ownership effective in curbing cost escalation is an oversimplification. The type of accountability appears to matter more to cost escalation than type of ownership.
In five studies, university students predicted their affective reactions to a wide variety of positive and negative future events. In Studies 1 to 3, participants also reported the affective reactions they experienced when the target event occurred. As hypothesized, they tended to anticipate more intense reactions than they actually experienced. In Studies 3 to 5, a cognitive determinant of this “intensity bias” was examined. It was hypothesized that people anticipate stronger affective reactions when they focus narrowly on an upcoming event in a manner that neglects past experience and less intense reactions when they consider a set of relevant previous experiences. Evidence from thought-listing measures as well as an experimental manipulation of temporal focus supported this hypothesis.
The authors summarize 35 years of empirical research on goal-setting theory. They describe the core findings of the theory, the mechanisms by which goals operate, moderators of goal effects, the relation of goals and satisfaction, and the role of goals as mediators of incentives. The external validity and practical significance of goal-setting theory are explained, and new directions in goal-setting research are discussed. The relationships of goal setting to other theories are described as are the theory’s limitations.
Although a robust finding in cross-cultural research is that Japanese exhibit less self-enhancement than North Americans, all of these studies have employed questionnaire measures susceptible to self-presentational biases. The present study assessed self-enhancement in a laboratory that covertly measured participants’ behaviors. Whereas Canadians were reluctant to conclude that they had performed worse than their average classmate, Japanese were hesitant to conclude that they had performed better. This research provides evidence that cultural differences in self-enhancement and self-criticism go beyond mere self-presentation.
This chapter explores the issue of evaluative consistency and context-dependence by considering when stability or flexibility in evaluative responding would be most useful for the social organism. We propose that cues about distance functionally shape evaluations to flexibly incorporate information from their current context when individuals are acting on proximal stimuli, but to transcend these immediate details when acting on distal stimuli. In this chapter, we review research within and beyond the attitude domain that has helped to shed light on issues of evaluative consistency, and then build on this research to describe the proposed link between distance and evaluative consistency in more detail. We suggest that construal level provides a cognitive mechanism by which distance can regulate evaluative consistency, and describe both past research that can be reinterpreted in this light as well as more recent research that provides some direct support for our approach. We conclude by discussing implications for shared reality and social influence.
In two longitudinal studies, university students, their roommates, and parents assessed the quality and forecast the longevity of the students’ dating relationships. The longitudinal nature of this research allowed assessment of the relative accuracy of predictions offered by students and observers. Students assessed their relationships more positively, focusing primarily on the strengths of their relationships, and made more optimistic predictions than did parents and roommates. Although students were more confident in their predictions, their explicit forecasts tended to be less accurate than those of the two observer groups. Students, however, possessed information that could have yielded more accurate forecasts: In comparison to parents’ and roommates’ evaluations of relationship quality, students’ assessments of relationship quality were more predictive of stability at 1 year. Implications of these findings for understanding biases and accuracy in prediction are discussed.
Confidence has been found to vary with temporal proximity to an upcoming task: People's confidence that they will do well tends to diminish as the "moment of truth" draws near. We propose that this phenomenon stems in part from individuals using their pretask arousal as a cue to their level of confidence. Arousal that is part and parcel of "gearing up" to perform a task may be misattributed to diminished confidence. Consistent with this reasoning, participants in two experiments who were encouraged to misattribute their arousal to a neutral source ("subliminal noise") expressed greater confidence in their ability than did participants not able to do so-a result that would not be obtained if arousal was simply a reflection, and not a cause, of diminished confidence.
Scenarios are stories that depict some future event. We reviewed the research in which scenarios were created either by researchers or by research participants with or without structured guidelines. Regardless of how scenarios are created, they have been shown to alter people’s expectations about the depicted events. Evidence suggests that the ease with which a scenario is imagined or constructed, or the plausibility of a scenario, upwardly biases beliefs that the depicted event could occur. In some instances, attitudes or behaviors consistent with the altered expectancies have been observed. For example, persons who imagined subscribing to cable television were more likely to have favorable attitudes toward cable television and to subscribe than those receiving standard sales information, and mental health clinic clients who imagined remaining in therapy for at least four sessions were less likely to drop out prematurely than clients who simply received information on remaining in therapy. Practitioners who wish to alter clients’ expectancies regarding specific events can provide scenarios that (a) depict the occurrence of an event using concrete examples (not abstract information), (b) contain representative events, (c) contain easily recalled supporting evidence, (d) contain events linked by causal connections, (e) ask clients to project themselves into the situation, (f) require clients to describe how they acted and felt in the situation, (g) use plausible elements in the story, (h) include reasons why the events occur, (i) require clients to explain the outcomes, (j) take into account clients’ experiences with the topic, and (k) avoid causing reactance or boomerang effects in clients who might resent blatant influence attempts. We make additional recommendations concerning the situation in which clients are exposed to scenarios and the use of multiple scenarios.
A selective review of research highlights the emerging view of groups as information processors. In this review, the authors include research on processing objectives, attention, encoding, storage, retrieval, processing response, feedback, and learning in small interacting task groups. The groups as information processors perspective underscores several characteristic dimensions of variability in group performance of cognitive tasks, namely, commonality—uniqueness of information, convergence–diversity of ideas, accentuation–attenuation of cognitive processes, and belongingness–distinctiveness of members. A combination of contributions framework provides an additional conceptualization of information processing in groups. The authors also address implications, caveats, and questions for future research and theory regarding groups as information processors.
In everyday life people estimate completion times for projects in the near and distant future. How might the temporal proximity of a project influence prediction? Given that closer events elicit more concrete construals, we proposed that temporal proximity could enhance two kinds of concrete cognitions pertinent to task completion predictions: step-by-step plans and potential obstacles. Although these cognitions have opposite implications for prediction, and thus could cancel each other out, we hypothesized that temporal proximity would have a greater impact on cognitions that were relatively focal. Thus contextual factors that alter the relative focus on plans vs. obstacles should determine whether and how temporal proximity affects prediction. Six studies supported this reasoning. In contexts that elicited a focus on planning, individuals predicted earlier completion times for close than distant projects. In contexts that prompted a focus on obstacles, individuals predicted later completion times for close than distant projects.
Choice often produces conflict. This notion, however, plays no role in classical decision theory, in which each alternative is assigned a value, and the decision maker selects from every choice set the option with the highest value. We contrast this principle of value maximization with the hypothesis that the option to delay choice or seek new alternatives is more likely to be selected when conflict is high than when it is low. This hypothesis is supported by several studies showing that the tendency to defer decision, search for new alternatives, or choose the default option can be increased when the offered set is enlarged or improved, contrary to the principle of value maximization.
People typically underestimate the time necessary to complete their tasks. According to the planning fallacy model of optimistic time predictions, this underestimation occurs because people focus on developing a specific plan for the current task and neglect the implications of past failures to meet similar deadlines. We extend the classic planning fallacy model by proposing that a phenomenal quality of mental imagery – the visual perspective that is adopted – may moderate the optimistic prediction bias. Consistent with this proposal, participants in four studies predicted longer completion times, and thus were less prone to bias, when they imagined an upcoming task from the third-person rather than first-person perspective. Third-person imagery reduced people’s focus on optimistic plans, increased their focus on potential obstacles, and decreased the impact of task-relevant motives on prediction. The findings suggest that third-person imagery helps individuals generate more realistic predictions by reducing cognitive and motivational processes that typically contribute to bias.
Two studies examined the relative accuracy of subjects' self-predictions of their future behavior versus predictions made by others who knew them very well. Self-predictions were more accurate than those made by subjects' mothers or peers. This was especially true when negative outcomes were predicted, when predictions were made against the base rate, or when events with less extreme base rates were predicted. Subjects whose behavior was more atypical and those who described themselves as impulsive were more difficult to predict, both for themselves and generally for others. Differential accuracy is discussed in terms of the role of self-protective biases and the information base that is available for predictions.
The authors investigated compensatory self-enhancement in Japanese and Canadian university students. Research has revealed that when North Americans publicly discover a weakness in one self domain, they typically bolster their self-assessments in another unrelated domain. This effect is less commonly found in private settings. Following a private failure experience on a creativity task, Canadians discounted the negative feedback, although they did not exhibit a compensatory self-enhancing response. In contrast, Japanese were highly responsive to the failure feedback and showed evidence of reverse compensatory self-enhancement. This study provides further evidence that self-evaluation maintenance strategies are elusive among Japanese samples.
Megaprojects and Risk provides the first detailed examination of the phenomenon of megaprojects. It is a fascinating account of how the promoters of multi-billion dollar megaprojects systematically and self-servingly misinform parliaments, the public and the media in order to get projects approved and built. It shows, in unusual depth, how the formula for approval is an unhealthy cocktail of underestimated costs, overestimated revenues, undervalued environmental impacts and overvalued economic development effects. This results in projects that are extremely risky, but where the risk is concealed from MPs, taxpayers and investors. The authors not only explore the problems but also suggest practical solutions drawing on theory, experience and hard, scientific evidence from the several hundred projects in twenty nations and five continents that illustrate the book. Accessibly written, it will be the standard reference for students, scholars, planners, economists, auditors, politicians and interested citizens for many years to come.
"Over budget, over time, over and over again" appears to be an appropriate slogan for large, complex infrastructure projects. This article explains why cost, benefits, and time forecasts for such projects are systematically over-optimistic in the planning phase. The underlying reasons for forecasting errors are grouped into three categories: delusions or honest mistakes; deceptions or strategic manipulation of information or processes; or bad luck. Delusion and deception have each been addressed in the management literature before, but here they are jointly considered for the first time. They are specifically applied to infrastructure problems in a manner that allows both academics and practitioners to understand and implement the suggested corrective procedures. The article provides a framework for analyzing the relative explanatory power of delusion and deception. It also suggests a simplified framework for analyzing the complex principal-agent relationships that are involved in the approval and construction of large infrastructure projects, which can be used to improve forecasts. Finally, the article illustrates reference class forecasting, an outside view de-biasing technique that has proven successful in overcoming both delusion and deception in private and public investment decisions.
This paper presents an approach to elicitation and correction of intuitive forecasts, which attempts to retain the valid component of intuitive judgments while correcting some biases to which they are prone. This approach is applied to two tasks that experts are often required to perform in the context of forecasting and in the service of decision making: the prediction of values and the assessment of confidence intervals. The analysis of these judgments reveals two major biases: non-regressiveness of predictions and overconfidence. Both biases are traced to people's tendency to give insufficient weight to certain types of information, e.g., the base-rate frequency of outcomes and their predictability. The corrective procedures described in this paper are designed to elicit from experts relevant information which they would normally neglect, and to help them integrate this information with their intuitive impressions in a manner that respects basic principles of statistical prediction.
The mental processes by which people construct scenarios, or examples, resemble the running of the simulation model. Mental simulation appears to be used to make predictions, assess probabilities and evaluate casual statements. A particular form of simulation, which concerns the mental undoing of certain events, plays an important role in the analysis of regret and close calls. Two rules of mental undoing are proposed. According to the downhill rule, people undo events by removing surprising or unexpected occurrences. According to the focus rule, people manipulate the entities on which they focus. The implications of the rules of undoing and mental simulation to the evaluation of scenarios are discussed. (Author)
The American Planning Association recently endorsed a new forecasting method called reference class forecasting, which is based on theories of planning and decision-making that won the 2002 Nobel prize in economics. This paper details the method and describes the first instance of reference class forecasting in planning practice. First, the paper documents that inaccurate projections of costs, demand, and other impacts of plans are a major problem in planning. Second, the paper explains inaccuracy in terms of optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Third, the theoretical basis is presented for reference class forecasting, which achieves accuracy in projections by basing them on actual performance in a reference class of comparable actions and thereby bypassing both optimism bias and strategic misrepresentation. Fourth, the paper presents the first case of practical reference class forecasting, which concerns cost projections for planning of large transportation infrastructure investments in the UK, including the Edinburgh Tram and London’s £15 billion Crossrail project. Finally, potentials for and barriers to reference class forecasting are assessed.
We review our research on predictions in two different domains: (a) people's estimates of how long they will take to complete various academic and everyday tasks and (b) forecasts by individuals in dating relationships of the future course of their romantic association. Our research indicates that people underestimate their completion times. Further, people appear to base their estimates on plan-based, future scenarios and they use attributional mechanisms to deny the relevance of their past failures to complete tasks on time. The optimistic bias disappears when observers forecast the completion times of other individuals (actors). Observers' estimates are no more accurate, however; instead observers exhibit a pessimistic bias, overestimating actors' task completion times. Compared to actors, observers make greater use of relevant previous experiences in generating their predictions; also while proposing future scenarios, observers are more likely to mention circumstances that might impede the actor's progress on the task. Our findings in the domain of love were generally consistent with those in the domain of work.
Conducted 3 experiments which demonstrated that group-induced shifts in choice are the result of informational influence processes, specifically, persuasive argumentation. These processes were hypothesized to be similar to those described in group-problem-solving research. In Exp I (n = 60 male undergraduates), the relative frequency and the persuasiveness of pro-risk to pro-caution arguments that Ss possessed prior to discussion correlated with (a) their initial choice of risk level and (b) the overall initial mean choice on the dilemmas. In Exp II (n = 196 male undergraduates), it was hypothesized that while a member's initial choice was determined by the balance of pro-risk and pro-caution arguments, shifts in choice following discussion would occur only when most of the persuasive arguments were partially shared (i.e., known to only a few members). This was tested by applying a partially shared information model that predicts shifts in choice after discussion. Results support the hypothesis. Exp III (n = 41 male undergraduates) produced additional support for the informational influence hypothesis; Ss received arguments produced by others before discussion, and merely reading these arguments produced substantial shifts in choice. (38 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Fault trees represent problem situations by organizing "things that could go wrong" into functional categories. Such trees are essential devices for analyzing and evaluating the fallibility of complex systems. They follow many different formats, sometimes by design, other times inadvertently. The present study examined the effects of varying 3 aspects of fault tree structure on the evaluation of a fault tree for the event "a car fails to start." The fault trees studied had 4 to 8 branches, including "battery charge insufficient," "fuel system defective," and "all other problems." Six experiments were conducted, 5 of which used a total of 628 college community members and 1 of which used 29 experienced auto mechanics. Results show the following: (a) Ss were quite insensitive to what had been left out of a fault tree. (b) Increasing the amount of detail for the tree as a whole or just for some of its branches produced small effects on perceptions. (c) The perceived importance of a particular branch was increased by presenting it in pieces (i.e., as 2 separate component branches). Insensitivity to omissions was found with both college Ss and mechanics. It is suggested that, aside from their relevance for the study of problem solving, results have implications for (a) how best to inform the public about technological risks and to involve it in policy decisions and (b) how experts should perform fault tree analyses of the risks from technological systems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
When people encounter problems in translating their goals into action (e.g., failing to get started, becoming distracted, or falling into bad habits), they may strategically call on automatic processes in an attempt to secure goal attainment. This can be achieved by plans in the form of implementation intentions that link anticipated critical situations to goal-directed responses ("Whenever situation
x arises, I will initiate the goal-directed response
y!"). Implementation intentions delegate the control of goal-directed responses to anticipated situational cues, which (when actually encountered) elicit these responses automatically. A program of research demonstrates that implementation intentions further the attainment of goals, and it reveals the underlying processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Psychologically distant things are those that are not present in the direct experience of reality. There are different reasons for things not to be present in the immediate reality experienced by me. Things may belong to the past or to the future (e.g., my first year of marriage, my first year of school), to spatially remote locations (e.g., my parents' house, the North Pole), to other people (the way my best friend or a person from another culture perceives the present situation), and to hypothetical alternatives to reality, what could or might have been but never materialized (e.g., had I married another person or had I had wings). These alternatives to the directly experienced reality define, respectively, four dimensions of psychological distances--temporal distance, spatial distance, social distance, and hypotheticality. In each pair of examples of distal things, the first example is more proximal than the second. We would like to propose that in relation to psychological distance, these various distance dimensions are anchored on a single starting point (zero distance point), which is my direct experience of the here and now. Anything else--other times, other places, experiences of other people, and hypothetical alternatives to reality--is a mental construct. This analysis suggests a basic relationship between psychological distance and construal; that is, any distancing (i.e., moving beyond direct experience) involves construal. Based on construal-level theory, we distinguish between extents (levels) of construal and propose that more distal entities, which are more remote from direct experience, are construed on a higher level (i.e., involve more construal). The second section of this chapter discusses in more detail the concept of level of construal and the association between level of construal and psychological distance. That section addresses two implications of this association, namely, that psychological distance would produce higher levels of construal and that, conversely, high levels of construal would enhance perceived distance. The third section examines the effects of psychological distance on confidence in prediction, intensity of affective reactions, and evaluation and choice. We present evidence suggesting that the effects of various distance dimensions are similar to each other and are mediated by level of construal. The fourth section further proposes that the different psychological distances are interrelated and to some extent interchangeable. That is, distancing an object on one dimension may be exchanged for distancing the object on another dimension. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
This study tested the hypothesis that group discussion moderates the tendency of attributors to underuse consensus information. In Study 1, high- or low-consensus information was associated with a description of a target person's behavior for 259 male and female Ss. Before rendering attributions, Ss spent 7 min either engaging in a group discussion, thinking about their judgment, or perusing attribution responses made by other Ss. Only the participants in the group-discussion conditions were affected by the consensus information. Three additional studies used procedures similar to those used by A. Vinokur and E. Burnstein (see record
1974-25207-001) to test a persuasive-arguments explanation of this group-discussion effect. The findings of these studies supported this view. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Tested 3 hypotheses concerning people's predictions of task completion times: (1) people underestimate their own but not others' completion times, (2) people focus on plan-based scenarios rather than on relevant past experiences while generating their predictions, and (3) people's attributions diminish the relevance of past experiences. Five studies were conducted with a total of 465 undergraduates. Results support each hypothesis. Ss' predictions of their completion times were too optimistic for a variety of academic and nonacademic tasks. Think-aloud procedures revealed that Ss focused primarily on future scenarios when predicting their completion times. The optimistic bias was eliminated for Ss instructed to connect relevant past experiences with their predictions. Ss attributed their past prediction failures to external, transient, and specific factors. Observer Ss overestimated others' completion times and made greater use of relevant past experiences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Experts are often called on to predict the performance of novices, but cognitive heuristics may interfere with experts' ability to capitalize on their superior knowledge in predicting novice task performance. In Study 1, experts, intermediate users, and novices predicted the time it would take novices to complete a complex task. In Study 2, expertise was experimentally manipulated. In both studies, those with more expertise were worse predictors of novice performance times and were resistant to debiasing techniques intended to reduce underestimation. Findings from these studies suggest that experts may have a cognitive handicap that leads to underestimating the difficulty novices face and that those with an intermediate level of expertise may be more accurate in predicting novices' performance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Three studies tested hypotheses that temporal frames influence the group planning fallacy and are associated with subjective distance to deadlines and thoughts about successful task completion. Temporal framing effects occurred even though actual times to deadlines were held constant. In Study 1, groups predicted course project completion. Those adopting little time remaining frames exhibited less planning fallacy than those adopting lots of time remaining frames. Little time remaining frames were related to deadlines feeling closer and to fewer thoughts about success. Study 2 replicated this finding using a laboratory assembly task. Study 3 further indicated that it is whether thoughts about success come to mind easily, not thought content, that produces this effect; thoughts about success also led to deadlines feeling closer. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
A review of the evidence for and against the proposition that self-serving biases affect attributions of causality indicates that there is little empirical support for the proposition in its most general form. Some support was found for the contention that individuals engage in self-enhancing attributions under conditions of success, but only minimal evidence suggested that individuals engage in self-protective attributions under conditions of failure. Moreover, it was proposed that the self-enhancing effect may not be due to motivational distortion, but rather to the tendency of people to (a) expect their behavior to produce success, (b) discern a closer covariation between behavior and outcomes in the case of increasing success than in the case of constant failure, and (c) misconstrue the meaning of contingency. (60 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Two experiments addressed relations between judgmental processes and action by examining both the impact of the anchoring/adjustment heuristic on judgments of performance capabilities and the subsequent impact of these self-efficacy judgments on behavior. In Exp I, 62 undergraduates judged their capabilities for performance on a problem-solving task after exposure to ostensibly random anchor values representing either high or low levels of performance. Ss in a control condition received no anchor values. Anchoring biases strongly affected self-efficacy judgments. High-anchor Ss evidenced the highest judgments of their capabilities and low-anchor Ss the lowest judgments. Ss then performed the task. Differences in task persistence paralleled the differences in self-efficacy judgments, with high-anchor Ss displaying the highest level of task persistence. Exp II, with 23 high school students, replicated these results. In both studies, self-efficacy was predictive of both between-group differences and variations in performance within the anchoring conditions. (36 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Cognitive and motivational processes underlying time prediction were studied in 5 experiments. Experiments 1–4 tested several debiasing techniques including decomposition, surprises, multiple scenarios (optimistic, best guess, pessimistic), anchoring and adjustment, social prediction, encoding (familiarity), and task performance delay. None of the manipulations resulted in significantly different predictions. Experiment 5 tested the effect of financial incentives. Contrary to expectations, participants given financial incentives for speed gave shorter predictions but performed the task no more quickly than those without incentives. Participants were motivated to be wishful thinkers but not more capable doers. Three practical implications result: (a) Formal prediction methods may not be as accurate as assumed, (b) social forecasting is not necessarily a prediction panacea, and (c) those who schedule tasks should pay particular attention to actors' motivations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
Whether you're a manager, company psychologist, quality control specialist, or involved with motivating people to work harder in any capacity—Locke and Latham's guide will hand you the keen insight and practical advice you need to reach even your toughest cases. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)