Planning, personality, and prediction: The role of future focus in optimistic time predictions

Buehler, Roger; Griffin, Dale W.

doi:10.1016/s0749-5978(03)00089-x

Cited by 112 publications

(115 citation statements)

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“…The prospect that optimism contributes to greater bias in the time predictions of powerful individuals is, however, dampened by past research that failed to find an association between optimism and temporal bias (Buehler & Griffin, 2003;Jørgensen & Faugli, 2006). Likewise, empirical evidence is lacking that confirms the link between mood and biased time predictions.…”

Section: Power Affects Goal-directed Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By ignoring the distribution of similar events people fail to consider how long similar tasks usually take (see also Kahneman & Lovallo, 1993). Later research confirmed that people are reluctant to consider past experiences in their planning, and this makes them prone to bias in their forecasts (Buehler et al, 1994;Buehler & Griffin, 2003).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Factors that alter people's attentional focus can, therefore, strengthen or alleviate the tendency to underestimate time. For example, enhancing people's goalfocus by means of instructions (Buehler & Griffin, 2003), or incentives (Buehler, Griffin, & MacDonald, 1997;Byram, 1997) renders time predictions less accurate.…”

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confidence: 99%

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How long will it take? Power biases time predictions

Weick

Guinote

2010

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

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Section: Power Affects Goal-directed Attentionmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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How long will it take? Power biases time predictions

Weick

Guinote

2010

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

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“…It argues that, instead of making time predictions, one should measure progress and extrapolate this progress to determine when tasks will be finished. 6 In spite of the unrealistic suggestion that people should stop requesting and giving time predictions before a project starts, it is indeed a good idea to extrapolate time usage from the first stage to predict the time usage of the remaining work. Essentially, the NoEstimates movement advocates the use of a simple time prediction model based on highly local data.…”

Section: Time Prediction Modelsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Attempts to identify when, where, and how to complete a task that involves concrete, specific plans of the steps involved may sometimes increase the level of overoptimism. This has particularly been observed in predictions of when a task will be completed (completion date) [6]. A step-by-step unpacking of a task may omit important components and focusing on the steps involved may make people think that the task will be performed exactly as imagined, without delays or interruptions, which, in turn, may lead to an illusion of control and overly optimistic time predictions.…”

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confidence: 99%

Time Prediction Methods and Principles

Halkjelsvik

Jørgensen

2018

Time Predictions

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The prominent approach for reducing a problem's complexity is to decompose it into less complex subproblems, solve each of these, and then aggregate the subsolutions into an overall solution. In time prediction contexts, this approach is typically the basis of what has been referred to as the bottom-up method, the activity-based method, or predictions based on a work breakdown structure. Generally, across a range of domains, decomposition has been found to improve judgement quality and increase prediction accuracy [1]. In the domain of time predictions, however, there are also situations in which decomposition leads to overoptimistic and less accurate judgements [2].The time prediction literature has examined two types of decomposition strategies: unpacking, which consists of merely listing or thinking about the subcomponents of a task before predicting the time usage as a whole, and decomposition, which consists of unpacking, predicting the time usage for each unpacked component, and then aggregating the time predictions into a prediction of the total time usage.Unpacking: Unpacking tend to give higher time predictions. For example, if you ask people to list all the persons for whom they must buy Christmas presents, they will tend to predict that they need more time to complete their Christmas shopping compared to those who did not generate such a list. Unpacking strategies may be based either on the self-generation of components, as in the example above, or on reminding the participants of possible subcomponents, for example, by using a checklist for activities to be included. Checklists, or reminders, are usually very effective and easy to implement and may improve the accuracy of time predictions, particularly in situations in which there is a tendency towards overoptimistic time predictions [3]. In one study illustrating how unpacking tends to increase time predictions, participants were instructed to format a document to match a printed, edited version of the same document. When asked to predict how long it would take to format the document without any reminders of the work's components, the participants predicted, on average, eight and a half minutes. When asked to predict how long it would take with reminders of the work's components, such as including italics and special characters (ђ,ǒ, î), the participants predicted, on average, about 13 minutes [4].In many cases, the increase in time predictions from unpacking a task contributes to greater realism [5]. Projects that used checklists when predicting time were, for example, more accurate and less overoptimistic (with predictions, on average, 10% too low) than projects that did not (with predictions, on average, 38% too low) [3]. Although unpacking may generally contribute to more accurate and less overoptimistic time predictions, this may not always be the case. Pointing out obvious components of a task, small and simple components, or components that are part of the last steps of a task may not lead to more accurate time predictions [4].There are also ...

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Individual Differences and Decision Making: What We Know and Where We Go from Here

Mohammed

Schwall

2009

International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology

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Planning, personality, and prediction: The role of future focus in optimistic time predictions

Cited by 112 publications

References 28 publications

How long will it take? Power biases time predictions

How long will it take? Power biases time predictions

Time Prediction Methods and Principles

Individual Differences and Decision Making: What We Know and Where We Go from Here

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