The Effects Of Observers’ And Participants’Task Experience On Planning Fallacy

The planning fallacy refers to people’s overoptimistic tendency to underestimate the time required to complete a future task,which is common and will impose negative effects on decision and judgment.Considering of that, large amount of literature try to clarify its psychological mechanism and coping strategy.Since1994*when Buehler, Griffin and Ross first focused their study on optimistic bias between observers and participants, researchers started explore this field. But still no agreement achieved on whether observers’prediction will be more accurate.Further more, task experience is a truly important factor effecting planning fallacy, however, almost no study found discussing experience’s effect on planning fallacy. This paper tries to explore the diversity of planning fallacy between observers and participants with different experience level, by studying the Chinese college students who have different level of experience on Counting money predict their own and a other student’s completion time of a counting money task.The research paradigm of planning fallacy studies uesd by classic planning fallacy theory researchers Buehler etc. was employed in study1, to explore the time prediction pattern in counting money task of subjects who possess different experience of that task. Study2investigated subjects’time estimation after completed that task using the paradigm used by researchers whose theoretical orientation is memory bias theory, such like Roy and Christenfeld. Study3combined two factors together which are time estimation from(high experience observers low experience observers vs. participant himself) and participants’task experience (high vs. low), and comprehensively examine their effects on planning fallacy. We found:1, the higher experience one task, the more underestimation of that task’s completion time;2, offering similar task’s accurate completion time will improve people’s prediction accuracy;3, Among all combinations of different experience of observers and participants, there is no significant difference only between high experience observers and high experience participants.