For decades, psychologists have repeatedly documented the basic human tendency to display unwarranted overconfidence.
- People attempting to lose weight believe that on this next attempt they will succeed despite numerous failed attempts in the past.
- Gamblers remain optimistic that this time they will beat the house, despite a history of evidence to the contrary.
All of us experience the “planning fallacy,” or the tendency to underestimate how long it will take to complete an upcoming task.
Why does this occur?
Cornell University psychologists Erik Helzer and Tom Gilovich offer a novel explanation. There is a prevalent belief that the power of one’s will is stronger in the future than in the past. In other words, the future is still open to multiple different outcomes, while the past is limited to the outcome that actually occurred. No amount of exertion can change the past. Thus, because the future affords more opportunities to harness their will to guide their actions, people believe that the role of the will is generally stronger in future events than in past events.
This contributes to overconfidence by leading people to discount the past relative to the wide-open future. In other words, people optimistically take advantage of the unknown and view themselves more in control of actions that are about to occur. Things will be different this time. People consider the willpower they have to be more potent in the future than in the past.
Is it possible that people are optimistic about the future simply because they have the capacity to learn from their mistakes?
Helzer and Gilovich do not deny that people sometimes learn from their mistakes. But they argue that people often overestimate their ability to apply these lessons. In so doing, they underestimate the degree to which uncontrollable forces produced their previous failure – uncontrollable forces that still exist now as they approach the upcoming attempt.
So what can we learn from this?
Clearly, avoiding the seductive planning fallacy is one of the most difficult of our many daily challenges. But perhaps there is promise in just stopping to consider how our (often irrational) beliefs about the future can lead us down a garden path. Knowing the root cause of the problem is half the battle.
Source: