Planning, personality, and prediction: The role of future focus in optimistic time predictions q Roger Buehler a, * and Dale Griffin b,c a Psychology Department, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3C5 b Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, USA c Faculty of Commerce and Business Administration, University of British Columbia, Canada Abstract The present studies examined cognitive processes underlying the tendency to underestimate project completion times. Two ex- periments tested the hypothesis that people generate overly optimistic predictions, in part, because they focus narrowly on their future plans for the target task and thus neglect other useful sources of information. Consistent with the hypothesis, instructing participants to adopt a ‘‘future focus’’—in which they generated concrete, specific plans for the task at hand—led them to make more optimistic predictions about when they would complete their intended Christmas shopping (Study 1) and major school assignments (Study 2). The future focus manipulation did not have a corresponding effect on actual completion times, and thus increased the degree of optimistic bias in prediction. The studies also demonstrated that the optimistic prediction bias generalized across different task domains, relevant individual differences (i.e., trait optimism and procrastination), and other contextual variations. Ó 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Prediction; Planning; Forecasting; Judgment; Optimistic bias; Future focus; Optimism; Procrastination Anecdotes, archival records, and surveys all indicate that professionals and lay people are typically overly optimistic in their predictions about when projects will be completed. This optimistic prediction bias is found in everyday projects such as completing major school as- signments or personal tax forms (Buehler, Griffin, & Ross, 1994, 1997; Griffin & Buehler, 1999) as well as large-scale industrial and commercial projects such as the completion of hydroelectric dams and public trans- portation systems (Flyvbjerg, Holme, & Soren, 2002; Hall, 1980; Schnaars, 1989). For example, in 1989 the General Accounting Office (GAO) of the United States government estimated that less than 1% of the Infor- mation Technology projects commissioned by the US department of defense met the triple goals of being completed on time, on budget, and fully operational. A simple summary of a large literature would be that people are characteristically optimistic in their predic- tions, and that this optimistic bias is multiplied when new and untested technology is involved (Cooke, 1991; Hall, 1980; Schnaars, 1989; Tull, 1967; Tyebjee, 1987). There are a number of explanations for this opti- mistic bias. In some cases, there is political or com- mercial pressure to maintain a public conviction that some optimistic target is attainable (Flyvbjerg et al., 2002; Hall, 1980). In other cases, such as some of those identified by the GAO report on procurement practices by the US department of defense, there are problems with the specifications of a project being upgraded into an unreasonable ‘‘wish-list’’ of features. And in other cases, especially with regard to the software industry, scheduling problems have been tied to the poor moni- toring of progress and the lack of management response to falling behind schedule (Abdel-Hamid & Madnick, 1991). There are a few exceptions to the optimistic rule. In our laboratory, we have found that simple, short tasks do not always elicit optimistic time predictions, and on Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 92 (2003) 80–90 ORGANIZATIONAL BEHAVIOR AND HUMAN DECISION PROCESSES www.elsevier.com/locate/obhdp q This research was supported by grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The findings were presented in January 2001 at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, San Antonio, Texas. We thank Colleen Bowers, Rebecca Filyer, Kim McGuinness, and Christina Polano for their assistance in conducting the studies. * Corresponding author. Fax: +519-746-7605. E-mail address: rbuehler@wlu.ca (R. Buehler). 0749-5978/$ - see front matter Ó 2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0749-5978(03)00089-X