What is the Planning Fallacy?
The planning fallacy is an intuitively obvious and scientifically well-measured tendency of people to assume projects will take less time than they do and that the outcome will be better than is justified by past data or experience. For instance, newlyweds almost universally expect their marriages to last a lifetime, when in fact less than half of marriages actually do. The planning fallacy has been studied by cognitive psychologists who have found evidence for, and strongly suspect that the fallacy is universal across the human species. That people’s predictions are optimistically biased has been called the most robust finding in the psychology of prediction. There are some exceptions to the planning fallacy. One is that people seem to actually accurately estimate for certain important and personally relevant events such as unwanted pregnancy. It is also well known that people overestimate the probability of rare, highly negative events happening to or around them, such as overestimat
The planning fallacy is an intuitively obvious and scientifically well-measured tendency of people to assume projects will take less time than they do and that the outcome will be better than is justified by past data or experience. For instance, newlyweds almost universally expect their marriages to last a lifetime, when in fact less than half of marriages actually do. The planning fallacy has been studied by cognitive psychologists who have found evidence for, and strongly suspect that the fallacy is universal across the human species. That people’s predictions are optimistically biased has been called the most robust finding in the psychology of prediction. There are some exceptions to the planning fallacy. One is that people seem to actually accurately estimate for certain important and personally relevant events such as unwanted pregnancy. It is also well known that people overestimate the probability of rare, highly negative events happening to or around them, such as overestim
