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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.
... Stepping outside one's own perspective to consider how various other people might be affected could conceivably prompt the person to consider both good and bad effects. This might overcome some of the favorable biases associated with self, such as the self-reference and ownership biases (Beggan, 1992;Rogers et al., 1977), the planning fallacy (Buehler et al., 2010), and irrational perseverance based on prior investments (the sunk cost effect; e.g., Arkes & Hutzel, 2000). ...
... Optimistically biased predictions are also involved in the socalled planning fallacy (Buehler et al., 2010). However, the very definition of the planning fallacy makes a stark contrast with our work on innovator bias. ...
... The definition of the planning fallacy invokes underestimating the time required to complete a task-particularly when the person has considerable experience of, or knowledge of, past failures of similar projects to be completed on time. Buehler et al. (2010) emphasize that merely making an optimistic estimate of how long it will take is not enough to qualify as planning fallacy. In their words, "The signature of the planning fallacy…is not that planners are optimistic but that they maintain their optimism about the current project in the face of historical evidence to the contrary" (p. ...
The innovator's bias is defined as the tendency for innovators to focus mainly on the positive potential impact of their inventions and to neglect, ignore, or downplay any potential negative impact. Such bias may help sustain the motivation needed for business success but may create problems by failing to acknowledge and prepare for problematic outcomes. We report three studies (total n = 1608) designed to demonstrate this bias—and to show how to overcome it (while ideally preserving the innovators' enthusiastic affection for their product). Three studies used hypothetical innovations, all with potential downsides. Feelings of ownership were manipulated by having some participants role‐play being marketing manager, including naming the product, devising advertising slogans, and identifying target demographics for potential purchasers. Owners then rated their product, while nonowner controls rated a different product. Study 1 (n = 495) demonstrated the innovator's bias by showing that owners rated the likely consequences of their product more favorably than nonowners did. Owners also displayed more enthusiastic zeal for their product. Study 2 (n = 553) tested interventions aimed at reducing the bias while preserving the zeal. Of six interventions, the most successful was having owners imagine the worst‐case scenario involving the most negative outcome that the invention could cause. Study 3 (n = 560) was a preregistered replication of the main findings from Study 2 (osf.io/ew9cq).
... In contrast, much less is known about the extent to which budgets influence real-world spending once they are set (Zhang and Sussman 2018). Second, budgeting apps have made expense tracking relatively easy, but setting a realistic budget remains a challenge for many consumers, even when they know how much money they have spent in the recent past (Howard et al. 2022;Peetz and Buehler 2009; see also Buehler, Griffin, and Peetz 2010). Therefore, focusing on the effect of budget setting on realworld spending fills an important gap in the consumer budgeting literature, and it can better inform consumer budgeting in practice. ...
... For example, studies have shown that consumers predict they will spend less in the future than in the past, but on average they end up spending approximately the same amount as before (Howard et al. 2022;Peetz and Buehler 2009). This pattern of results has also been observed for related phenomena like project completion times: planned project completion times are highly optimistic as compared to similar past projects, but actual completion times often end up being no different than past projects (Buehler et al. 2010). Taken together, these findings lead to the hypothesis that consumers will spend significantly more than they budget (hypothesis 1b). ...
... In contrast, trait optimism is associated with (marginally) stronger compliance because optimism is associated with higher budgets more strongly than with higher spending. This is notable, because it suggests that the tendency to set an optimistically low budget does not stem from an optimistic disposition (Buehler et al. 2010;Howard et al. 2022). Finally, trait self-control, spendthrift-tightwad tendencies, savings goals, financial propensity to plan, and financial literacy are not significantly correlated with budget compliance because they have a roughly equal effect on budgets and spending. ...
Foundational research in marketing and behavioral economics has revealed a great deal about the psychology of budgeting. However, little is known about the extent to which budgets do (or do not) influence consumers’ real-world spending. The present research addresses this gap in the literature using naturally occurring budgeting and spending data provided by a popular personal finance app in the UK, a field experiment conducted with members of a Canadian credit union, and a financial diary study conducted with consumers in the US. Budget compliance is generally weak because budgets are wildly optimistic. However, optimistic budgets do help consumers reduce their spending. Moreover, the influence of budgets on spending is surprisingly sticky: consumers continue to reduce their spending six months after setting a budget, even though spending remains over-budget. Impulsive consumers exhibit worse budget compliance than less-impulsive consumers. However, counterintuitively, this is predominately because more impulsive consumers set lower budgets than less-impulsive consumers, not because they spend more. Finally, we provide evidence that budgets influence spending across several theory-informing psychographic variables. Taken together, these findings show that budgets can be both wildly optimistic and highly influential and that beliefs about the nature of consumers’ budgets require updating.
... First, prior research indicates that the planning fallacy leads to an underestimation of risks, as individuals prone to this bias tend to focus on the future and ignore past experiences (Kannadhasan et al., 2014;Keh et al., 2002). In other words, focusing on the completion of a target event, such as establishing a business, may lead an individual to underestimate the risk that some other event will occur (Buehler et al., 2010;Kahneman and Lovallo, 1993). Similarly, entrepreneurship education has been found to enhance risk taking (Sánchez, 2011(Sánchez, , 2013, which indirectly influences entrepreneurial intentions through changes in attitudes (Ajzen, 1991;Lüthje and Franke, 2003). ...
... Second, the planning fallacy leads to overestimations of the benefits of an action (like starting a business). When individuals are asked to predict future scenarios based on 'best guess' scenarios, their predictions are generally not distinguishable from those generated by 'best case' scenarios (Buehler et al., 2010;Griffin et al., 1990). Thus, estimations for completion of a certain task or the likelihood of success of a new venture are likely to be overly optimistic if they are solely based on future scenarios (Buehler et al., 2010;Kannadhasan et al., 2014). ...
... When individuals are asked to predict future scenarios based on 'best guess' scenarios, their predictions are generally not distinguishable from those generated by 'best case' scenarios (Buehler et al., 2010;Griffin et al., 1990). Thus, estimations for completion of a certain task or the likelihood of success of a new venture are likely to be overly optimistic if they are solely based on future scenarios (Buehler et al., 2010;Kannadhasan et al., 2014). This may lead to positive perceptions of becoming an entrepreneur, which might change personal attitudes toward the behaviour -an antecedent of entrepreneurial intentions. ...
... First, prior research indicates that the planning fallacy leads to an underestimation of risks, as individuals prone to this bias tend to focus on the future and ignore past experiences (Kannadhasan et al., 2014;Keh et al., 2002). In other words, focusing on the completion of a target event, such as establishing a business, may lead an individual to underestimate the risk that some other event will occur (Buehler et al., 2010;Kahneman and Lovallo, 1993). Similarly, entrepreneurship education has been found to enhance risk taking (Sánchez, 2011(Sánchez, , 2013, which indirectly influences entrepreneurial intentions through changes in attitudes (Ajzen, 1991;Lüthje and Franke, 2003). ...
... Second, the planning fallacy leads to overestimations of the benefits of an action (like starting a business). When individuals are asked to predict future scenarios based on 'best guess' scenarios, their predictions are generally not distinguishable from those generated by 'best case' scenarios (Buehler et al., 2010;Griffin et al., 1990). Thus, estimations for completion of a certain task or the likelihood of success of a new venture are likely to be overly optimistic if they are solely based on future scenarios (Buehler et al., 2010;Kannadhasan et al., 2014). ...
... When individuals are asked to predict future scenarios based on 'best guess' scenarios, their predictions are generally not distinguishable from those generated by 'best case' scenarios (Buehler et al., 2010;Griffin et al., 1990). Thus, estimations for completion of a certain task or the likelihood of success of a new venture are likely to be overly optimistic if they are solely based on future scenarios (Buehler et al., 2010;Kannadhasan et al., 2014). This may lead to positive perceptions of becoming an entrepreneur, which might change personal attitudes toward the behaviour -an antecedent of entrepreneurial intentions. ...
... First, similar to the Studies 3 and 4, all participants read about the focal goal (diet or fitness) and three past instances of goal conflict. To manipulate self-relevance, we followed the approach of prior research on the planning fallacy (e.g., Buehler et al., 2010;Frank & Gilovich, 1989) and described these events as either experienced by the self or by another person. In the high self-relevance condition, participants imagined that they personally had the focal goal and experienced goal conflict (same as in the previous studies). ...
... Finally, the findings relate to prior research and offer new perspectives on forecasting. First, because we examine situations in which people make predictions about the future in the context of information about the past, our work relates to research on the planning fallacy (i.e., the systematic underestimation of time needed to complete a future task, despite contradictory evidence; Buehler et al., 1994Buehler et al., , 2010. The prior work has proposed that such forecasting errors occur when people focus on specific information about an individual case (i.e., taking an "inside view") rather than on broader information about a distribution of relevant cases (i.e., taking an "outside view"; Griffin & Buehler, 1999;Kahneman & Lovallo, 1993;Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). ...
Many important personal goals, such as health, career, finances, and social relationships, entail repeatedly performing the same (or similar) actions over time (e.g., to exercise daily or save money weekly). When pursuing such ongoing goals, people are likely to accumulate multiple experiences of goal conflict (e.g., multiple occasions when one failed to exercise or save as intended). How might these past experiences of goal conflict inform expectations about future goal pursuit? This research examines how the perceived relationship among past conflicts with a focal goal—in particular, perceived variety—shapes expectations. Perceived variety refers to the holistic assessment of differentiation (vs. similarity) among items in an assortment. Six studies demonstrate that perceiving greater variety among past conflicts with a focal goal decreases expectations of encountering conflict in the future. This occurs because perceiving greater variety makes the causes of past events seem collectively unstable (i.e., more temporary and one-off). Consequently, holding constant the number and content of past events, perceiving greater variety among past conflicts with a focal goal reduces expected goal conflict. Further, considering past events that prompt (i.e., motivate) less (vs. more) engagement in causal search (i.e., events that are less self-relevant, or positive) attenuates perceived variety’s effects. The findings contribute to understanding of goal conflict, variety and similarity, and forecasting in goal pursuit.
... Using a positive frame to convince decision-makers to authorize a project is a well-known phenomenon in the project management literature. This type of framing could lead to strategic misrepresentation of a project, which is considered to be one of the main reasons for overruns of projects in a variety of contexts, including IS projects [9,25,23,40]. ...
... First, future studies could further explore the various reasons behind this systematic pattern of language usage in business cases that we observed. Prior research provides some possible reasons for this pattern, including an overoptimistic view and strategic misrepresentation [9,25,23,40]. Our analysis, however, did not allow us to determine the specific reasons for the pattern that we observed. ...
Many information systems (IS) projects encounter significant problems. The literature suggests that decision-makers can be misled by overoptimistic estimates. We argue that such overoptimism may also be present in the choice of language in business cases. In this study, we analyzed the usage of such framing in 20 business cases for large IS projects of the Dutch government. Our findings show that newly proposed systems are systematically framed using positive adjectives, whereas the existing systems are framed using negative adjectives. This pattern of framing may subconsciously bias the decision-makers toward investing in new IS projects.
... In this research, we suggest that the number of budget categories considered for spending and saving needs will influence consumers' budget estimation. According to the support theory, consumers are more likely to pay attention to and estimate that a given future event/outcome would happen when described in more detail (i.e., prediction bias, see Buehler et al. 2010;Tversky and Koehler 1994). By extending these findings, another stream of research shows the so-called unpacking effects in various domains, such that consumers tend to have a lower estimate for an overarching category than the sum of their estimates for all subcategories (Rottenstrich and Tversky 1997;Savitsky et al. 2005;Kruger and Evans 2004). ...
... According to the goal-setting theory, when consumers experience conflicts between goals and possible obstacles, they are more likely to set goals with commitment (Gollwitzer et al. 2010;Gollwitzer and Oettingen 2011). This occurs because such conflict offers a chance for consumers to elaborate on their subjective perception of goal pursuit matched with the objective situation of goal pursuit, thereby leading them to set goals with commitment (Buehler et al. 2010). Furthermore, when conflicts arise between short-and long-term goals, consumers tend to exercise self-regulation to pursue long-term goals by actively perceiving long-term goals as more important (Fishbach and Trope 2005). ...
This research explores how consumers plan for their personal finances, focusing on the simultaneous effects of spending and saving needs in budget-setting. The current research proposes that the number of budget categories and salient savings goals interactively influence consumers’ budget estimation. In two lab studies, we showed that participants with a salient savings goal tend to experience conflicts when they have the same (vs. different) number of budget categories for spending and saving needs, thereby perceiving the increased savings goal importance, which leads to the increased money allocation to saving. Our results further suggest that a detailed financial plan may not always help consumers to pursue financial success. This research contributes to the body of work on budgeting and consumer finance. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.
... Planning allows workers to collaborate efficiently on multiple projects [3], to spend time on the tasks that matter to them most [4], and to ensure they spend quality time away from work to recuperate from work stress [5]. Yet, despite the fact that regular planning at work is beneficial, knowledge workers still experience challenges getting into the habit of planning [6], making realistic plans [7], and sticking to these plans [8]. A study that measured how accurately knowledge workers plan their work found that they left 27% planned work incomplete by end of the day [9]. ...
... To compare with previous literature, [9] found that 27% of tasks were not completed. These findings are in line with general optimistic attitude in planning [7]. ...
Reliable and accurate planning is essential for modern knowledge workers. However, there is limited insight about when, how and why planning is inaccurate, and the circumstances in which those inaccuracies are troublesome. To investigate this, we asked 20 academics to keep a diary for a single work day. They estimated the duration of the tasks they wanted to achieve at the start of the day and noted down in detail the tasks they actually achieved during the day. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to complement this diary data. The diaries showed that some tasks, such as email and coding, were more susceptible to time underestimation bias while other tasks, such as writing and planning, were more susceptible to time overestimation bias in planning. Based on interviews, a typology of common reasons for delays in planned daily work is presented. It suggests that vague and optimistic planning leads to the observed discrepancy between planned and actual work. Finally, interviews suggested that participants adopted four planning strategies that vary in the frequency of planning, from minimal planning to daily, weekly and multi-level planning. We close by discussing ways support systems for accurate planning can be better designed for different use cases.
... 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.
... Buehler et al. (2005 and2010) use "think aloud" procedures and demonstrate that, indeed, individuals are reluctant to consider distributional information and are more likely to focus on the task at hand. Buehler et al. (2010) demonstrate that priming questions for recall of past experiences before generating predictions can eliminate some of the temporal errors. Without such recall, individuals might be focusing on idealized cases. ...
... Accountable measures and incentive alignment are extremely valuable is such settings. Buehler et al. (2010; also discussed in Halkjelsvik and Jørgensen 2012) report on how performance-based incentives influence planning and estimation. Using a field-based study (originally described by Buehler et al. 1997), they show that Canadian taxpayers expecting a tax refund generated more optimistic predictions and ignored historical information to a larger degree than those expecting to owe taxes. ...
Companies today are constantly seeking ways to innovate, organically grow, and stay ahead of their competitors. There is an increasing focus on improving processes of creativity, design, and innovation. Firms ask: How do we foster a culture for innovation and encourage creativity? How can we generate more and better ideas for new products and services? How can these ideas become a reality? And finally, how can we execute our projects better and faster than our competitors? We examine the associated activities taken by the firm and seek to understand human behavior in these activities. We take a behavioral operations perspective on the processes of creativity and innovation through new product development and project execution. We survey the main behavioral tendencies documented in this area and synthesize the key insights on how they have been shown to influence decision‐making. The survey also helps clarify areas where further research is necessary.
... 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.
... Students may have succumbed to the well-described 'planning fallacy' , according to which the duration of any activity is often underestimated, despite previous experience. [16] This pitfall can potentially be overcome by the provision of a structured timeline for the various activities involved in the MMed thesis process. ...
Background:
The Health Professions Council of South Africa implemented a compulsory research component for specialist practitioner registration through the Master of Medicine (MMed) degree in 2011, eliciting both commendation and critique. Chief among the concerns is the extended time required for MMed completion. This study explores the duration of each component of the MMed research thesis and discusses the potential problematic areas in terms of its timeous completion, about which there is currently a lack of data, with particular regard to the South African (SA) setting.
Objectives:
To quantitatively delineate the various components of the MMed research thesis process, identify potential barriers to its completion, and formulate a recommended evidence-based proposed timeline allowing for successful and timeous completion of the MMed.
Methods:
We conducted a retrospective review of MMed degrees completed by paediatrics registrars at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, SA, from 1 January 2011 to 31 December 2018, and an electronic survey of former MMed students, detailing the duration of each of the components of the MMed research thesis process.
Results:
The survey had a 70.5% response rate (n=148 respondents, of whom 141 fully completed the survey). The median (interquartile range) time to complete the MMed research thesis was 30 (21 - 42) months. While 78.0% of respondents deemed 4 years adequate for completion, 15.6% reported durations exceeding 4 years, and 2.1% had not completed the MMed. The components of the research thesis with the longest duration in terms of completion included development of a first draft of the research protocol, data analysis, and development of the first draft of the final report. Factors reportedly associated with successful completion of the thesis were a supportive supervisor and the provision of a research rotation.
Conclusion:
A significant portion of candidates do not complete the MMed research thesis within the 4-year training period, hindering specialist registration. The major contributing factors appear to be related to candidates' inexperience regarding the research process and lack of exposure to it, as well as some of the administrative procedures involved. Utilisation of the recommendations and structured timeline will help identify problematic areas timeously and ensure successful completion of the thesis.
... There are several task management tools for planning and keeping track of tasks, for e.g., calendars, to-do lists, project management software, notebooks, email, scraps of paper, and word documents [8,9,16]. However, despite such strategies, users still struggle with getting into the habit of planning [16] and making realistic plans [11]. Time management literature suggests that short-term planning behaviors show the most significant relationship to one's desired outcomes [6,22,31]. ...
Efficient task planning is essential for productivity and mental well-being, yet individuals often struggle to create realistic plans and reflect upon their productivity. Leveraging the advancement in artificial intelligence (AI), conversational agents have emerged as a promising tool for enhancing productivity. Our work focuses on externalizing plans through conversation, aiming to solidify intentions and foster focused action, thereby positively impacting their productivity and mental well-being. We share our plan of designing a conversational agent to offer insightful questions and reflective prompts for increasing plan adherence by leveraging the social interactivity of natural conversations. Previous studies have shown the effectiveness of such agents, but many interventions remain static, leading to decreased user engagement over time. To address this limitation, we propose a novel rotation and context-aware prompting strategy, providing users with varied interventions daily. Our system, PITCH, utilizes large language models (LLMs) to facilitate externalization and reflection on daily plans. Through this study, we investigate the impact of externalizing tasks with conversational agents on productivity and mental well-being, and the effectiveness of a rotation strategy in maintaining user engagement.
... The planning fallacy is a cognitive bias in which individuals tend to underestimate the time, costs, and risks associated with future actions or projects, while overestimating the benefits or outcomes [7]. Essentially, people tend to be overly optimistic when making plans, assuming that things will go more smoothly and quickly than they typically do in reality. ...
Extensive research has consistently demonstrated that humans frequently diverge from rational decision-making processes due to the pervasive influence of cognitive biases. This paper conducts an examination of the impact of cognitive biases on high-stakes decision-making within the context of the joint pediatric cardiology and cardiothoracic surgery conference, offering practical recommendations for mitigating their effects. Recognized biases such as confirmation bias, availability bias, outcome bias, overconfidence bias, sunk cost fallacy, loss aversion, planning fallacy, authority bias, and illusion of agreement are analyzed concerning their specific implications within this conference setting. To counteract these biases and enhance the quality of decision-making, practical strategies are proposed, including the implementation of a no-interruption policy until all data is reviewed, leaders refraining from immediate input, requiring participants to formulate independent judgments prior to sharing recommendations, explicit probability estimations grounded in base rates, seeking external opinions, and promoting an environment that encourages dissenting perspectives.
... Furthermore, administrators may also have overly optimistic predictions regarding the time (and costs) involved in completing projects (Buehler et al., 2010;Buehler et al., 1994;Kahneman and Tversky, 1982). This phenomenon is known as planning fallacy and could explain why the EU Commission was in comparison to other countries so late in concluding agreements with COVID-19 vaccine producers. ...
This paper seeks to address the role of European public policy in addressing the problem of Covid-19 vaccine-rollout policy. Currently in Europe, instead of market-based allocation a centralized command-based approach has been implemented to address the essential questions of production and distribution of vaccines throughout the EU. This is centralized, command-based decision-making on the allocation of vaccines which is leading to political and sociological tensions among EU Member States. Paper argues that in order to mitigate these shortcomings European public policy could employ a more nuanced approach. While employing law and economics tools this paper addresses the questions on how European societies should allocate vaccine and, more importantly, who should make this allocation decisions. Moreover, identified moral negative externalities, status quo and omission biases, planning fallacy, risk aversion, administrative rigidity, notorious type-I-type-II error fallacy and related unraveled markets phenomena might result in vaccine-rollout failures.
... Planning fallacies are described in the seminal work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky [25] and have been proven to affect judgments and decisions. The planning fallacy, see for instance [26] and [27], stems from agents taking an inside view focusing on the constituents of the specific planned action rather than on the outcomes of similar actions already completed. Thus, for example, the estimated costs put forward by cities competing to hold the Olympic Games have consistently been underestimated; yet, every four years these errors are repeated [28]. ...
The VUCA world is the epitome of the challenges linked with some of the undercurrents currently shaping businesses in the projectified society. The terms volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) are used as descriptive for the continuous flux project managers and project planners are forced to keep at bay. In this article, the authors present an idea to connect the VUCA concept as a risk identification platform to access, identify and isolate low-probability but high-impact events often called black swans or fat tail events. It is argued that the assumptions of conventional risk assessment in the domain of project management can lead to skewed general outcomes due to limitations of the intellect to assess probability. The outline of the VUCA meter is drafted and argued that the meter can augment the conventional risk assessment
... This conflict between the expected number of evacuation preparation tasks and the short estimate of evacuation preparation time suggest that the respondents are vulnerable to the "planning fallacy"-underestimating the amount of time that it takes to complete a series of tasks [87]. Emergency managers can address this issue by encouraging people to conduct household evacuation preparation drills in which one person announces a start time and the other household members perform the tasks they expect to complete in preparation for evacuation. ...
The U.S. Pacific Northwest coast must be prepared to evacuate immediately after a Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. This requires coastal residents to understand the tsunami threat, have accurate expectations about warning sources, engage in preimpact evacuation preparedness actions, and plan (and practice) their evacuation logistics, including an appropriate transportation mode, evacuation route, and destination. A survey of 221 residents in three communities identified areas in which many coastal residents have reached adequate levels of preparedness. Moreover, residents who are not adequately prepared are willing to improve their performance in most of the areas in which they fall short. However, many respondents expect to engage in time-consuming evacuation preparations before evacuating. Additionally, their estimates of evacuation travel time might be inaccurate because only 28–52% had practiced their evacuation routes. These results indicate that more coastal residents should prepare grab-and-go kits to speed their departure, as well as practice evacuation preparation and evacuation travel to test the accuracy of these evacuation time estimates. Overall, these results, together with recommendations for overcoming them, can guide CSZ emergency managers in methods of improving hazard awareness and education programs. In addition, these data can guide transportation engineers’ evacuation analyses and evacuation plans.
... It is known that knowledge workers experience challenges in keeping a planning routine [14,13], making realistic plans [6], and sticking to these plans [9,20]. Most days, work does not go according to plan: a diary study that measured how accurately researchers in academia plan their daily tasks found that they left 34% of work incomplete by the end of the day [1]. ...
As a result of transitioning to remote work during the COVID-19 lockdown, many knowledge workers had to quickly invent new ways of managing work while working entirely from home. The research community currently lacks insights about how such a stressful and disruptive event might impact how people plan their work. To start filling this gap, the current study explored how knowledge workers adjust their planning routines, strategies and tools during this unprecedented global crisis. It consists of longitudinal weekly interviews with 15 participants during the UK's COVID-19 lockdown. Early stage analysis of 68 interviews is presented. Findings suggest that workers experienced planning challenges that prevented them from keeping their existing planning routines. We describe those planning challenges together with the new planning routines, strategies and tools that participants developed during this period. These insights are discussed in terms of future research directions that can benefit both workers and organisations to support the transition to productive remote work.
... The planning fallacy is the tendency to underestimate how much time is needed to complete a future task despite the knowledge of how long such tasks have previously taken (Baron, 1998;Buehler et al., 2010). This comes from the fact that decision-makers focus on the more optimistic scenario for the task. ...
This thesis empirically explores the interaction between cognitive factors related to an entrepreneur’s confidence, financial decisions, and a firm’s performance. The objective of this study is to analyze the effects of some specific cognitive variables highly present in the entrepreneurial context and better understand how they shape a firm’s capital structure and entrepreneurial funding decisions. We first rely on a systematic literature review that investigates what are the main cognitive factors related to entrepreneurial confidence and how it affects a firm’s decisions and firm’s outcomes. Second, we address the relationship between ESE and fundraising and a firm’s performance in the second study of the thesis. A third study empirically addresses three cognitive factors related to an entrepreneur’s confidence in the decision to borrow bank credits. The manuscript brings originality and novelty by analyzing the effects of a specific class of cognitive variables related to an entrepreneur’s confidence.
... The time stress that employed adults experience at work also results from tight deadlines (17,18). Some deadlines are strict: once an original deadline has passed, taking any action related to the task is impossible or costly. ...
Significance
Time stress—the feeling of having too many things to do and not enough time to do them—is a societal epidemic that compromises productivity, physical health, and emotional well-being. Past research shows that women experience disproportionately greater time stress than men and has illuminated a variety of contributing factors. Across nine studies, we identify a previously unexplored predictor of this gender difference. Women avoid asking for more time to complete work tasks, even when deadlines are explicitly adjustable, undermining their well-being and task performance. We shed light on a possible solution: the implementation of formal policies to facilitate deadline extension requests. These findings advance our understanding of the gendered experience of time stress and provide a scalable organizational intervention.
... However, spending goals were notably higher in Study 2 compared to Study 1. This may have been due to this difference in the order of manipulation and goal assessment, or this might be due to the fact that participants in Study 2 were asked to recall their past monthly spending directly before setting the goal (past behavior is most predictive of future behavior, e.g., Buehler, Griffin, & Peetz, 2010;Ouellette & Wood, 1998). Notably, this difference in goal amount led to a difference between studies in terms of the goal accuracy. ...
We examined the spontaneous use and effectiveness of financial self-control strategies in individuals' everyday spending. In Study 1 (N = 377), participants who listed the strategies they personally already use at intake and several times throughout a month spent an average 236 less that month than participants in a control group. In contrast, participants who were provided with six established strategies spent an average $50 less that month than participants in a control group, which was not significant. In Study 3 (N = 339), we found that better fit of the strategies with participants' personality and better fit with the spending situation were linked to making fewer hypothetical spending decisions. In other words, personally generated self-control strategies might be more effective at promoting goal pursuit than provided strategies because they fit the person who generates them better.
... Misestimation can often be attributed to strategic incentives, for example, gathering political support for the proposed project (Flyvbjerg 2008). However, a review of psychological studies by Buehler et al. (2010) as well as a comprehensive review of empirical duration estimation studies, laboratory and field experiments by Halkjelsvik and Jørgensen (2012) reveal a frequent tendency to underestimate the duration even if there are little or no incentives to manipulate the forecasts. From this perspective, the planning fallacy can be considered an instance of a general optimism bias (Lovallo and Kahneman 2003). ...
How to avoid project failures driven by overoptimistic schedules? Managers often attempt to mitigate the duration underestimation and improve the accuracy of project schedules by providing their planners with excessively detailed project specifications. While this traditional approach may be intuitive, solely providing more detailed information has proven to have a limited effect on eliminating behavioral biases. We experimentally test the effectiveness of providing detailed specification and compare it to an alternative intervention of providing historical information about the average duration of similar projects in the past. We find that both interventions mitigate the underestimation bias. However, since providing detailed project specification results in high variance of estimation errors due to sizable over‐ and underestimates, only the provision of historical information leads to more accurate project duration estimates. We also test whether it is more effective to anchor planners by providing historical information simultaneously with the project specification or to provide the historical information only after beliefs regarding the project duration are formed, in which case planners can regress their initial estimates toward the historical average. We find that the timing of disclosing information does not play a role as the estimation bias is mitigated and the accuracy is improved in both conditions. Finally, we observe that the subjective confidence in the accuracy of duration estimates does not vary across the interventions, suggesting that the confidence is neither a function of the amount nor the detail of available information.
... Furthermore, a thorough revision of previous plans, prior to proposing new ones can provide insight into the true timelines and budgets required for similar projects within the Galapagos or other relevant contexts. This exercise can be used as the "outside view" as referred to by Kahneman and Tversky to set benchmarks and avoid a planning fallacy due to optimism bias [76]. This benchmark can also aid in managing expectations of the financing institutions that generally define key performance indicators, the multiple stakeholders invested in water management and the expected beneficiaries. ...
Human activities contribute to the degradation of water quality on the Galapagos Islands, affecting human health and Galapagos’ fragile ecosystem. Despite the numerous resources vested in water management, programs have yet to achieve measurable improvements in water quality. To identify the governance mechanisms and barriers to improving water quality, we applied a two-pronged strategy: a collaborative, bottom-up compilation and prioritization of technical specialists and stakeholders’ concerns, and an evaluation of top-down government plans. The comparison of priorities and programs shows four major themes that require attention: barriers to better governance, community involvement, research, and policy. The islands lack a transparent method for accountability of the funds designated for water management, the efficacy of implementation, and results and progress beyond government periods. Government projects have included limited public participation, resulting in projects that do not meet stakeholder’s needs and concerns. Furthermore, the majority of the programs have not been completed within the timeline or budgets allocated. We recommend implementing a participatory governance mechanism that responds to each island’s context, balances socioecological and policy priorities and evaluates past projects to have adequate benchmarking, mitigating a planning fallacy. All programs should be accompanied by a transparent monitoring system that ensures accountability and evaluates water quality programs’ efficiency and effectiveness, according to goals and indicators developed collaboratively. This research may aid practitioners in small island developing states (SIDS) around the globe that are struggling with similar water management and governance issues and who may benefit from taking a bottom-up and top-down approach to assessing technical specialists’ and local stakeholders’ concerns in relation to past, present and future government programs.
... In the realm of planning and prediction, low-level construals may heighten the specific obstacles forecasters may encounter (e.g. changes in motivation, competing demands for their time, lack of skills or ability; Buehler et al., 2010). Hence, people appear to be more sensitive to competing demands (i.e. ...
People often underestimate their completion times of future tasks or events. The phenomenon of optimistic time prediction is called the planning fallacy. Prior research has demonstrated that individuals are less likely to make optimistic predictions about events that are temporally relatively close. Furthermore, events involving relatively more effort are perceived as temporally closer. Hence, we recruited 102 undergraduates and conducted an experiment to test whether a high-effort assignment would reduce perceived temporal distance to the deadline and, thereby, reduce the planning fallacy. The results showed that participants in the high-effort condition perceived the deadline as temporally closer, generated less optimistic time predictions and were less likely to commit the planning fallacy. The inverse relationship between the amount of required effort and the likelihood of committing the planning fallacy was mediated by perceived temporal distance to the deadline. Our findings provide an innovative approach for reducing the planning fallacy in students.
... 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 overoptimistic. There are various psychological reasons for poor software estimates (see, for example, Buehler et al., 2010, Jørgensen & Moløkken-Østvold, 2004and 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.
Personal organization, productivity, and efficient use of one’s time represents one of the most ubiquitous and popular subjects within the self-help media marketed to general audiences. Consistent with this view, researchers have established that increased or more effective time management is predictive of improved well-being and performance within student populations. Within the framework of self-regulated learning, students’ achievement motivation stands out as a critical factor viewed as essential to understanding their time management. Nevertheless, a robust understanding of the theoretical relations that link motivation and time management thus far has escaped thorough scrutiny. Most notably, a dedicated consideration of the research linking motivation and time management has not yet been undertaken. Our overall purpose was to address this absence by synthesizing theoretical perspectives and evaluating empirical evidence linking achievement motivation and time management and by providing a guide for future research. In line with this overarching goal, we first review the conceptual understanding of time management and how it fits with achievement motivation within the framework of self-regulated learning. Next, we conduct a critical evaluation of empirical evidence regarding the connection of time management and core constructs drawn from five prominent models of achievement motivation. Finally, we draw broader conclusions and map out key directions for researchers and practitioners interested in motivation, time management, and their relations within academic contexts.
Four studies ( N = 2,524 U.S.-based adults recruited from the University of California, Berkeley, or Amazon Mechanical Turk) provide support for doubling-back aversion, a reluctance to pursue more efficient means to a goal when they entail undoing progress already made. These effects emerged in diverse contexts, both as participants physically navigated a virtual-reality world and as they completed different performance tasks. Doubling back was decomposed into two components: the deletion of progress already made and the addition to the proportion of a task that was left to complete. Each contributed independently to doubling-back aversion. These effects were robustly explained by shifts in subjective construals of both one’s past and future efforts that would result from doubling back, not by changes in perceptions of the relative length of different routes to an end state. Participants’ aversion to feeling their past efforts were a waste encouraged them to pursue less efficient means. We end by discussing how doubling-back aversion is distinct from established phenomena (e.g., the sunk-cost fallacy).
Individuals often have difficulties completing tasks in a timely manner. Whether it be scheduling a doctor's appointment, purchasing a birthday gift, or booking an airline ticket, waiting until the very last minute can carry serious consequences. In two experimental studies, we explore how individuals can be encouraged to finish tasks promptly. We provide evidence for the “fresh start effect” by showing that a temporal landmark signaling a new beginning helps speed up their task completion. Notably, we demonstrate that the “fresh start nudge” can facilitate early task completion through the underlying processes of meaningfulness and motivation. We also report the moderating role of task openness, supporting the claim that the fresh start effect is stronger when the task is perceived to be relatively closed (rather than open) and must therefore be completed in fewer steps without interruption.
In four experiments covering three different life domains, participants made future predictions in what they considered the most realistic scenario, an optimistic best-case scenario, or a pessimistic worst-case scenario ( N = 2,900 Americans). Consistent with a best-case heuristic, participants made “realistic” predictions that were much closer to their best-case scenario than to their worst-case scenario. We found the same best-case asymmetry in health-related predictions during the COVID-19 pandemic, for romantic relationships, and a future presidential election. In a fully between-subject design (Experiment 4), realistic and best-case predictions were practically identical, and they were naturally made faster than the worst-case predictions. At least in the current study domains, the findings suggest that people generate “realistic” predictions by leaning toward their best-case scenario and largely ignoring their worst-case scenario. Although political conservatism was correlated with lower covid-related risk perception and lower support of early public-health interventions, the best-case prediction heuristic was ideologically symmetric.
Üniversite öğrencileri, stratejik yönetim düşüncesinde kaynak tabanlı yaklaşım bağlamında, bir ülkede yükseköğrenim düzeyinde eğitim alan kişiler olarak ülkelerin gelecek hedeflerine ulaşılmasında stratejik bir unsur konumundadır. Bu noktada, üniversite öğrencilerinin öncelikle kendi geleceklerini şekillendirme üzerine oluşturacakları kurgular olarak “Kariyer Planları” özel bir öneme sahiptir. Son yıllarda yükseköğretim sisteminde üniversite öğrencilerine yönelik olarak gerçekleştirilen kariyer planlama eğitimlerinde bir artışın olması bu önemin bir sonucudur. Bu çalışmada Cumhurbaşkanlığı İnsan Kaynakları Ofisi koordinasyonunda 2020-2021 Eğitim Öğretim Yılı Güz Döneminde Süleyman Demirel Üniversitesinde müfredata eklenilen “KRY001 Kariyer Planlama ve Çalışma Hayatına Giriş” dersi özelinde gerçekleştirilen süreçler ve elde edilen çıktılar ortaya konmaya çalışılmıştır.
The human agent exists in a world consisting not only of facts and stimuli but also of possibilities. The multiplicity of possibilities is most readily apparent in the future. Pragmatic prospection theory proposes that people think about the future to predict possibilities (e.g. choice points requiring decision) rather than final outcomes. This process can be analyzed into two heuristic steps. The first one envisions a desirable outcome and therefore is optimistically biased. The second step considers how to reach that outcome, including noting obstacles and difficulties, and is therefore less subject to optimistic bias. Many psychological processes are adapted for an environment in which uncertainty is a frequent aspect, and the psychology of dealing with uncertainty mixes simple, crude responses (e.g. conserve resources, be alert to all information) with complex and sometimes irrational ones. The advanced human form of agency, sometimes called free will, involves complex processes including mental simulation of future alternatives, integration across time, and application of meaningful categories and principles to the causation of behavior.
Technology is ranked as one of the most important factors influencing education in Australia, with a growing demand for digital innovation to elevate the learning experience. Online opportunities for clinical education have also recently expanded, as evidenced by 80 new health portfolio subjects developed at Torrens University of Australia (TUA) during the years 2018 – 2021, with clinical reasoning being a key skill for learners in Health sciences and Nursing courses to cultivate. While there are documented reasons why problem-based learning (PBL) and team-based learning (TBL) are both used in clinical education, research has often focused on assessment scores and learner perceptions when comparing Face-to-Face (F2F) traditional lecture style with a group learning experience. This thesis explores the potential for combining elements of traditional PBL and TBL (hybrid approach) to enhance development of independent and group clinical reasoning skills for undergraduate learners within an online environment.
A longitudinal research approach encompassed multiple design-based research (DBR) phases using qualitative reflexive thematic analysis (RTA) method for data interpretation. An initial scoping review and pilot cycle resulted in a set of four draft design principles used to inform testing, refining and retesting an online decision wheel tool artefact and hybrid PBL approach in the situated context of Torrens University. Bounded rationality theory was used as an analytical guide to reflect on enhancing decision-making holistically. In total (excluding focus group numbers), participants included 34 learners, 26 teachers , 5 digital designers and 1 central researcher involved in developing, delivering and reviewing levels of undergraduate health science and nursing subjects across Face-to-Face (F2F), Blended Learning (BL) and Fully Online Learning (FOL) platforms. Data generated before and during the impact of COVID-19 consisted of 44 interviews, 20 focus groups, 10 participant reflective journal entries (4 learners and 6 teachers), 65 researcher reflective journal entries and 40 learner decision wheel attempts over five DBR action cycles (12-week Trimesters).
This study makes an original contribution to both practice and theory by offering a set of six innovative final design principles to assist enhancing clinical reasoning development for a situated context. Although there is a fast-paced universal move towards digital innovation in higher education, identification and response to contextualised learning needs for stakeholders is important for quality experience. From this research a new PBL-informed model, named BE-HIVE, was conceptualised to operationalise specific final design principles inclusive of having a central teacher guide, adequate coaching support, simple learning designs, time for reflexive practice, and enhancing the ability for a diversity of key stakeholders to collaborate and be partners in curriculum. Additionally, this project has generated new understanding into the potential expansion of bounded rationality theory, along with how to adopt a methodologically cohesive and solely qualitative approach for design-based research.
The importance of this study is driven by the significant role the investment in railway projects plays in the national economy. The economic stability of many countries depends on the short and long term benefits of these projects. Decision makers often face difficulties in assessing the economic feasibility of infrastructure projects, given the number of risks and uncertainties associated with investing in these projects. Therefore, this study aimed to develop a methodology to address uncertainties related to quantitative and qualitative risks associated with costs and revenues estimations for railway projects.
To achieve this goal, a new mathematical model has been developed using Reference Class Forecasting method and Fuzzy Sets theory to improve costs and revenues estimations for railway projects. The applicability of the proposed model is illustrated using the feasibility study of the development of Aleppo-Damascus railway project, conducting sensitivity analyses and analysing associated results. The study concluded the possibility of using the proposed model as a tool to support the decision of sponsors and decision makers when selecting the economically viable investment option. The proposed model is easy to use in the field of uncertain decision-making, as it can be used as a tool for analysing the sensitivity of the economic feasibility of the project options under study.
The proposed methodology assumes: the availability of RCF data with high statistical quality; the performance of the project under study is similar to the projects used to inform Reference Class Forecasting data; excluding the inflation as one of causes for the increase in costs and revenues of railway projects.
Planning-performance theory suggests that formal planning has a positive impact on performance. Accordingly, traditional project management methodologies advocate formal planning as an essential process in any project. However, alternative recent project management methodologies (e.g., Agile) promote less focus on a formal planning process at the start of a project. In this article, we question when formal planning is effective, when it is counterproductive, and which planning approach (strategic or tactical) is more effective for various project risk levels and performance dimensions (efficiency and effectiveness). Results from analyzing 2002 projects suggest that strategic planning has a higher value than tactical planning. Furthermore, tactical planning has a negative impact on project efficiency in low-risk projects as it increases project duration and cost but adds little value. In practice, in low-risk projects, managers may limit their focus on counterproductive tactical practices, such as risk, and procurement planning, and focus instead on long-term strategic planning, such as human resources planning. Theoretically, this article sets boundaries of effectiveness for planning-performance theory and advances the literature on the planning fallacy.
Using companies listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange and the Taipei Exchange between 2000 and 2017, this study explores whether the sobering-up effect exists in analysts’ earnings forecasts. Further, this study also examined whether the aggregate bias (accuracy) of analysts’ annual earnings forecasts vary with analysts’ familiarity with the forecasted companies and whether analysts’ forecasting behavior is influenced by market sentiment. Our findings provide evidence for the existence of sobering-up effect on analysts’ earnings forecasts. When analysts forecast earnings for companies that they are less familiar with or the market is bearish, the analysts’ strength of sobering is more significant.
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?
Understanding the characteristics of social judgments in helping and help-seeking is profoundly essential to facilitate efficient and satisfactory interactions among human beings. Potential helpers and help-recipients have asymmetric perceptions in several aspects, including likelihood of seeking or receiving help, efforts invested in helping, anticipated emotions, and preferred manners in which aid is given. In consequence, they frequently mispredict how others truly think, feel and behave, which may inhibit the occurrence of cooperation and the spread of prosocial behavior. We propose that such prediction errors are inevitable under the joint influence of individual cognitive limitations and social factors. To bridge the gap between helpers and help-recipients, individuals and organizations should take its causes into account. Future research is encouraged to investigate the manifestation of prediction errors in online helping, emotional assistance, and between close others.
Introduction Open any introductory marketing textbook and you will learn that the role of the firm is to create, communicate, and deliver value to the consumer who, in turn, takes the passive role of paying and consuming. For many years, this was, in fact, how marketers, consumer researchers, and psychologists perceived these two roles; the notion of consumer input into value creation was almost entirely neglected.This began to change when researchers in the area of innovation identified product users modifying and innovating on their own. In fact, von Hippel, De Jong, and Flowers (2012) found that in a representative sample of UK consumers, more than 6 percent had engaged in product modification or innovation during the prior three years, resulting in annual product development expenditures 1.4 times larger than the respective research and development (R&D) expenditures of all UK firms. More broadly, what emerged was the concept of “democratizing innovation,” that getting users actively involved in the process of new product development (NPD) can be a great source of value to the consumer and, thus, the firm (von Hippel, 2005). Today, consumer input is a recognized force in new product development, so much so that the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) listed it as one of its top priorities for exploration for 2008 through 2010.A parallel development in the marketplace has been that firms are going after smaller and more well-defined segments (Dalgic & Leeuw, 1994; Kotler & Armstrong, 2013). This is due to a number of factors, including the abundance of brands competing in many sectors; the rapid growth in media outlets, particularly online; and the increasing amount of information available on individual consumers. The result is that, in both media (Nelson-Field & Riebe, 2011) and products (Dalgic, 2006), the use of niche marketing is on the rise, while mass marketing is becoming an increasingly less viable option, particularly for new products.These two developments, consumer involvement in design as well as smaller target markets, have resulted in the practice of self-customization, where instead of offering ready-made products, the firm equips consumers with the tools to customize and design their own product. This can be viewed as the ultimate form of niche marketing, where the resulting segments consist of individuals.
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.
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)
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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)
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.
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.
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.
Review of J. Scott Armstrong's 1978 book
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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)