PSY 005 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Planning Fallacy, Fallacy, Psy

• School: College of The Sequoias
• Department: Psychology (PSY)
• Course: PSY 005
• Professor: Fulmer

Document Summary

Planning fallacy: people consistently underestimate how long it will take to complete a task. Typically, only about 30% of respondents will have completed the task by the predicted deadline, and most will take substantially longer than they estimated. When people estimate how long a task will take, they focus on specific ways the task can be accomplished without considering potential problems that might occur. Experiment: participants directed most of their thoughts (about 75%) to the future, especially plans for how to accomplish the task. Very few thoughts considered problems that might occur (about 3%) or participants own past experiences with similar tasks. Counterfactual thoughts: reflections on how past events might have turned out differently. It helps us to avoid similar negative outcomes in the future. Experiment: results showed that the number of upward counterfactual thoughts students generated after the first test predicted the extend of reported changes in circumstances prior to the second test.