When things don't go as expected: the planning fallacy
Self-regulation
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This week we’re continuing our series on self-regulation. Self-regulation is the act of controlling your thoughts, feelings and behaviours in order to reach your goals. But it’s something we often fail at. Last time we talked about why we’re bad at the decision-making phase of self-regulation. Today we’ll talk about why we often fail to execute those decisions.
Planning fallacy
What it is: The planning fallacy is ‘the tendency to hold a confident belief that one’s own project will proceed as planned, even while knowing that the vast majority of similar projects have run late’ (Buehler, Griffin & Ross. 1994).
Why it’s important: Even if we’ve successfully decided which goals to pursue, we will never be able to reach them if we don’t know how to get there. Being able to plan which steps to take is essential in making sure our actions result in success.
Why we fail at it: When making predictions about our own behaviour, we tend to focus on our future plans rather than past actions. One study asked psychology students to estimate when they would submit their current thesis (Buehler, Griffin & Ross. 1994). The students were asked to make three estimates: one for “if everything went as well as it possibly could”, one for “if everything went as poorly as it possibly could”, and one that was “as accurate as possible”. Later, the researchers compared their actual submission dates to their estimates. On average, students took longer to submit than their most pessimistic estimates.
Thank you for reading and see you next time.
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