Planning fallacy and its relationship to the false consensus effect

Abstract

Exceeding deadlines and budgets occurs frequently in our daily lives, and this may be due to a failure to accurately predict the time, costs, and efforts we will need to complete a task or project, despite the knowledge that previous similar tasks took longer, costs, and efforts in general. Cognitive psychologists and social psychologists called this the planning fallacy, as many of us fall prey to the planning fallacy, (Buehler & etal, 1994: 366), whether it is in social plans, work projects, or anything on the personal to-do list, (Gilovich & etal, 2002:4). The literature has indicated the spread of the planning fallacy in multiple areas, as the underestimation of the importance of time and costs to complete personal, academic, and work-related tasks has been documented in a wide range of studies. The academy among students (Buehler&etal, 1994:370). Roy and colleagues argue that the planning fallacy is due to memory bias. (Roy&etal, 2005:738) Bezo et al. argue that the reason people make optimistic estimates is their desire to make a good impression on others.