"Exploring the "planning fallacy
Why people underestimate their task completion times
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6201710 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Roger Buehler (Simon Fraser University), Dale Griffin (0000-0003-0942-3897), M G Ro (0000-0001-5500-404X), Michael Ro, Michael Ross (0000-0003-3407-9071) |
| Year | 1994 |
| Volume | 67 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 366-381 |
| Publication date | 1994-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-3514 • E-ISSN: 1939-1315 |
| Publisher | American Psychological Association (APA) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.366 |
| OpenAlex | W2051411313 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 194 |
| References cited | 20 |
This study tested 3 main hypotheses concerning people's predictions of task completion times: (a) People underestimate their own but not others' completion times, (b) people focus on plan-based scenarios rather than on relevant past experiences while generating their predictions, and (c) people's attributions diminish the relevance of past experiences. Results supported 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. In Study 4, the optimistic bias was eliminated for Ss instructed to connect relevant past experiences with their predictions. In Studies 3 and 4, Ss attributed their past prediction failures to relatively external, transient, and specific factors. In Study 5, observer Ss overestimated others' completion times and made greater use of relevant past experiences
Cognitive psychology · Epistemology · Fallacy · Task (project management) · Behavioral Health and Interventions · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics · Psychology · Social and Intergroup Psychology · Social Psychology
I Can Do It in No Time!” Time Predictions in the Cultural Context
Purchase deadline as a moderator of the effects of price uncertainty on search duration
Underpredicting Learning after Initial Experience with a Product
Knowledge Calibration
The Exception Is the Rule
Changing the Future by Reshaping the Past
A Generalizable Scale of Propensity to Plan
Thinking deadline
The Principle of the Malevolent Hiding Hand; or, the Planning Fallacy Writ Large
The trouble with overconfidence
Sobering up
Causal attribution across cultures
Demeaning
Change-of-meaning effects in conformity and dissent
First-time mothers' expectations of parenthood
Principles of Forecasting
Mind Perception
Situated Optimism
Value Attributes
Heuristics and Biases
The Role of Affect in the Entrepreneurial Process
Mistakenly seeking solitude.
Self-Knowledge
On the reality of cognitive illusions.
Individual differences in reasoning
The Motivational Impact of Temporal Focus
Believing what we do not believe
The cognitive perspective
Support theory
Perception and misperception of bias in human judgment
Exploring Causes of the Self‐serving Bias
If It's Hard to Read, It's Hard to Do
The Intention–Behavior Gap
Key questions regarding work engagement
Dispositional, Unrealistic, and Comparative Optimism
Residual Effects of Past on Later Behavior
Resource Slack and Propensity to Discount Delayed Investments of Time Versus Money.
Optimal Expectations
Bias and Accuracy in Close Relationships
Policy and Planning for Large-Infrastructure Projects
Cognitive mechanisms in entrepreneurship
Episodic Future Thought
Wisdom in Context
Longitudinal Study of Procrastination, Performance, Stress, and Health
Survival of the unfittest
Metacognitive Experiences and the Intricacies of Setting People Straight
Pragmatic Prospection
Episodic future thinking
How We See Ourselves and How We See Others
Consumer Inference
Exploring Solomon’s Paradox
Doing Unto Future Selves As You Would Do Unto Others
Behavioral Economics and Marketing in Aid of Decision Making among the Poor
Objectivity in the Eye of the Beholder
Psychology and Economics
Representativeness Revisited
From Thought to Action
Flawed Self-Assessment
Actions, Intentions, and Self-Assessment
Too Much of a Good Thing
Taking Stock of Unrealistic Optimism
Temporal construal.
Overcoming the planning fallacy through willpower
The Effect of Future Event Markers on Intertemporal Choice Is Moderated by the Reliance on Emotions versus Reason to Make Decisions
The risk of surprise in energy technology costs
Gender Differences in the Accuracy of Grade Expectancies and Evaluations
Anchors Distort Estimates of Expected Duration
Construing the Past and Future
Identifying and Mitigating the Negative Effects of Power in Organizations
Negotiating, fast and slow
Une étude prospective de la procrastination académique
Association and benefits of 24-h activity behavior and academic procrastination among Chinese college students based on the isotemporal substitution model
Improving accuracy in predictions about future performance
Taking another perspective on overconfidence in cognitive ability
Health workforce planning should be strategy or policy-driven
Too easy, too hard, or just right
On the Highway to Hell
Benevolent Conformity
Expert biases in technology foresight. Why they are a problem and how to mitigate them
The role of temporal distance on forecasting the difficulty of goal pursuits
On the Importance of Slack
Aha! moments correspond to metacognitive prediction errors
Fast optimism, slow realism? Causal evidence for a two-step model of future thinking
Children’s overestimation of performance across age, task, and historical time
A value-congruent bias in the forgiveness forecasts of religious people
How to Have Your Cake and Eat It Too
Good Intentions, Optimistic Self-Predictions, and Missed Opportunities
Worth Keeping but Not Exceeding
The role of framing and effort in green nudging acceptance
Exploring female entrepreneurs’ marketing decisions with a heuristics and biases approach
Perceptions of Health-Related Community Reentry Challenges among Incarcerated Drug Users in Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan, and Ukraine
Searching for certainty in an uncertain world
When 2 + 2 should be 5
Attributions for ambiguity in a treatment‐decision context can create ambiguity aversion or seeking
Increasing responsiveness of civil servants. A field experiment on freedom of information compliance
Planning Fallacy or Hiding Hand
Beneficial or Detrimental Ignorance
Making and Taking Risky Decisions
Assessing the consequences of unrealistic optimism
Improving metacognitive accuracy
Handbook of motivation and cognition
Reasons for confidence.
A Cognitive Model of Planning
The simulation heuristic
The base-rate fallacy in probability judgments
Variants of uncertainty
From Acts To Dispositions The Attribution Process In Person Perception
An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion.
Judgment under Uncertainty
Logic and Conversation
Great planning disasters
On the self-erasing nature of errors of prediction
Intuitive theories of events and the effects of base-rate information on prediction
Self-prediction
Constructing causal scenarios
Unrealistic optimism about future life events
The case for motivated reasoning
Excuses
Intraclass correlations
Illusion and well-being
| Unique citing works | 194 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 5,88 |
| Citation span | 1993 - 2026 (34) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 179 |