Overconfidence and effort: Go boldly where no one has ever gone before

There is a lot of evidence that people are overconfident in many judgments about themselves.  If you ask a group of people how talented they are at some skill relative to the population as a whole (or even relative to a specific group that they are a part of), the average response is above average.  This finding has sometimes been called the “Lake Wobegon” effect after the town in Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion where “all of the children are above average.”  Of course, everyone can’t really be above average, and so some people are overly optimistic about  their abilities.

What value does this optimism have?

A paper in the February, 2010 issue of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General by Ying Zhang and Ayelet Fishbach suggests that being optimistic about your ability to perform some task may enhance your overall performance.  However, this optimism is most useful when the task you expect the task you are about to perform is going to be difficult.

In one study, people were told that they were going to have to solve anagrams in which they had to rearrange the letters of a word to form other words.  For example, the word “items” can be rearranged to form the words “times,” “mites,” and “emits.”  They were led to believe that this task was going to be easy or difficult to do.

Before starting to solve the anagrams, half the people were asked to rate how well they would do on the task relative to everyone else doing it (knowing that the other participants would also be university students).  Of interest, when people thought they were going to get a hard task, they felt that they would do better than 66% of the other participants, but when they thought they were going to get an easy task, they felt they would do better than only 54% of the participants.  The other half of the people in the study did not rate how well they would do in the task relative to others.

The experimenters then measured how long people spent solving the anagrams.  People who did not rate how well they would do compared to others spent about the same amount of time on the task whether they were led to believe that it was going to be easy or hard (with a slight tendency for those who thought it was going to be easy to spend more time than those who thought it was going to be hard.

Those people who rated how well they would do on the task showed a much different pattern.  Those people who thought the task was going to be hard spent much more time on the task overall than those who thought the task would be easy.  The optimism of the people who thought the task would be hard translated into effort on the task.

It isn’t that people are incapable of making accurate assessments of their performance.   In another study, people made their judgments about how well they were going to do on the task under one of two different conditions.  One group was told that their reward for doing the task would be based on their overall performance.  A second group was told that their reward for doing the task would be based on whether their judgment of how well they would do relative to others was accurate.

The people who were rewarded for the accuracy of their judgment judged that they would be more likely to do well in the easy task than in the hard task, and they ended up spending more time at the easy task than the hard one.  Those who were rewarded for their performance on the task, though, judged that they would do better on the hard task than the easy task.  These people spent more time on the hard task than the easy one as well. 

These results suggest that it can be valuable to be overly optimistic about your performance.  In particular, when you are about to go where no one has ever gone before, you are better off going boldly where no one has ever gone before.  The optimism in the face of difficult tasks will help you to put more effort into performing well.

How do predictions affect completion time?

At any given moment, I have a lot of different things going on.  I’m often working with a number of different colleagues and students on research projects and papers.  I try to write entries for this blog regularly.  I edit a journal, and I have to read papers and write letters of acceptance or rejection. 

When I’m working with other people, it is often important for me to make predictions about when I will be finished with a part of the task that I have taken on.  These estimates allow my colleagues to make plans about when to expect my work and when they should plan to do their share of the project. 

Like most people, though, my predictions are often too optimistic.  That is, I’m sure that I’ll get things finished before I actually do.

An important question about these predictions, though is whether they affect how quickly you actually get things done.  That is, your prediction about when you will complete something may be rosy, but perhaps that rosy prediction actually  helps you get things done faster. 

This question was addressed in an interesting paper by Roger Buehler, Johanna Peetz, and Dale Griffin in the January, 2010 issue of Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 

They found that whether a prediction affects when you will complete a task depends on whether that task is “closed” or “open.”  A closed task is one that is generally completed in a single setting.  An open task is one that requires a number of steps that generally can’t be done at once.  Often open tasks are more complex than closed ones, but they don’t have to be.  For example, framing a photo you took on your digital camera is fairly easy.  First you print the picture, then you buy a frame that fits it, then you put the picture in the frame.  All told, it may take an hour of your time to complete the task.  Chances are, though, you will print the picture at one time, buy the picture frame at another time, and put it in the frame at yet a third time.

The results of their studies demonstrated that people’s predictions about deadlines affected when they started on the first of the tasks they had to perform.  People would begin the task earlier when they made an earlier prediction of when they would finish than when they made a later prediction.  So, for closed tasks that required just one sitting to complete, they would also finish them faster.  For open tasks, they would start the task faster if they made an earlier prediction than if they made a later prediction, but because the task involved multiple steps, they would not actually complete the task faster.

Let me step through one of the studies, because the methods they used were interesting.  In one study, they asked people to write three short stories from their home and then send it to the experimenters.  In the closed version of the task, the stories could be typed on a word processor and then emailed.  In the open version of the task, the stories had to be typed, printed out, and then mailed.   The open version of the task required putting the stories in an envelope, buying a stamp and mailing them, so it would probably involve at least two different steps.

To manipulate people’s predictions, they were given a time line starting with today and ending with the due date for the stories two weeks in the future.  To get people to make early predictions, they were asked to start at today and look forward on the time line and mark on the line when they would complete the assignment.  To get people to make late predictions, they were asked to start at the deadline and work backward and mark when they would complete the assignment.  This technique got the “early” people to make a significantly earlier prediction than the “late” people.

Consistent with the authors’ predictions, when people just had to email the stories, those who made early predictions sent in the stories earlier than those who made late predictions.  When people had to send the stories by mail, though, the effect went away.  The stories were sent in at about the same time regardless of the prediction.   

These studies suggest that there may be some value in making rosy predictions.  Being optimistic about when you will finish a task does help you to start it earlier.  But if a task is open-ended, you still need to be vigilant about completing all of the steps of that task.