The Effect Of Time Distance On The Estimation Of Task Duration In The Future

People always imagine things would happen in the future, and they estimate the time that task would take to make their daily plan work better. However, it is not perfectly right when we do the estimation. Researchers found we usually underestimate the time that task would take which was called “planning fallacy” while others found the opposite result. Many researchers demonstrate the influence factors of the phenomenon and put forward relevant theories which could explain the reason why we bias the estimation time. In addition, they test some methods to make the estimation more accuracy. The planning fallacy theory believes that we focus on the concrete information of the task and ignore the possible obstacles when we estimate how long it will takes which leads to the underestimation. According to the memory bias theory, individuals do search the similar task experience which unfortunately is biased when do the memory retrieval and reconstruction, and biased memories result in the biased estimation. The resource slack theory indicates that individuals think there are more resources like time in the future than now, and this perception of owning less time influence the time estimation. Construal level theory proposes that temporal distance changes people’s responses to future events by changing the way people mentally represent those events. The greater the temporal distance, the more likely are events to be represented in terms of a few abstract features that convey the perceived essence of the events(high-level construal) rather than in terms of more concrete and incidental details of the events(low-level construal). And according to the construal theory, the concrete scene imaging cause the underestimation while the abstract scene imaging make the estimation more close to the actual time. So, is there some difference in the estimations of task duration which are from different distances in the future?Based on the previous researches, this study discusses the influence of distance and the task complexity on the estimation of task in the future, and whether the task complexity play a role on that influence. The present study verifies that individuals predict that the distant tasks in the future take longer time than the close tasks through estimations on three different tasks in experiment 1 at first. And then, taking distance and task complexity as independent variables, our study discuss the influence of the two variables on the duration of estimation in experiment 2 and 3, and explore the reason of the influence from the ankle of time unit perception. The study works out the conclusions as follow:(1)Time distance does have an effect on the estimation of task duration in the future, and participants predict that the distant tasks in the future take longer time than the close tasks.(2)Task complexity acts a regulatory role in the effect of time distance on the task duration in the future. For simple tasks, individuals underestimate the duration of close tasks while overestimate the duration of distant tasks. For complicated tasks, individuals underestimate both the close and distant duration of tasks in the future.(3)The perception of time in the future has an effect on the estimation of task duration. For simple tasks in the future, individuals perceive the distant time unit shorter than the close time unit which result in overestimation on distant task and underestimation on close task.