Exploring the ‘Planning Fallacy’¶
Buehler, R., Griffin, D., & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the ‘Planning Fallacy’: Why People Underestimate Their Task Completion Times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366-381.
Cited by¶
3 citations across 3 artifacts.
Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.
Primes¶
- Planning Fallacy
- In personal and academic work, the original thesis-completion studies found students' best-, most-likely-, and even worst-case estimates all routinely exceeded.
This sourceThe canonical thesis-completion studies showing best-, most-likely-, and worst-case estimates all routinely exceeded, and feedback resistance.
- In personal and academic work, the original thesis-completion studies found students' best-, most-likely-, and even worst-case estimates all routinely exceeded.
Domain-specific¶
- Exaggerated Expectation
- the planning fallacy (named by Kahneman and Tversky for the tendency to underestimate the time and cost of one's own projects, and shown by Buehler, Griffin and Ross to afflict predictions of one's own task completion but not predictions about others, which observers if anything overestimate)
This sourceThe study showing that people underestimate their own task-completion times but not others', observers instead overestimating how long others will take. The honours-thesis study reporting a mean predicted completion of 33.9 days against an actual 55.5 days, with 29.7% of students finishing by their prediction. Reports that even predictions made assuming everything went as poorly as it possibly could averaged 48.6 days, short of the actual 55.5.
Supported in partVerified against the source
- the planning fallacy (named by Kahneman and Tversky for the tendency to underestimate the time and cost of one's own projects, and shown by Buehler, Griffin and Ross to afflict predictions of one's own task completion but not predictions about others, which observers if anything overestimate)
Mechanisms¶
- Calendar Capacity Audit
- Because the overhead multipliers are subjective, the honest failure is that they can be tuned to justify a conclusion already reached ("I'm slammed" or "I'm wide open"), and even a careful audit tends to under-book its own tasks — the planning fallacy in miniature
This sourceDocuments the planning fallacy: people make overly optimistic estimates of their own task-completion times.
- Because the overhead multipliers are subjective, the honest failure is that they can be tuned to justify a conclusion already reached ("I'm slammed" or "I'm wide open"), and even a careful audit tends to under-book its own tasks — the planning fallacy in miniature
Verification¶
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