Concept
Projection Bias
self-prediction decision-making cognitive-bias
People assume their current feelings, preferences, and motivational state will persist unchanged into the future, and make decisions in advance based on that false assumption — a bias that operates over both long timeframes (predicting who you'll be in 20 years) and surprisingly short ones (predicting how hungry or motivated you'll feel next week).
A snack-choice demonstration. Daniel Read and Barbara van Leeuwen asked participants to choose, in advance, between a healthy or unhealthy snack to receive a week later — asking some participants right after lunch (full) and others later in the afternoon (hungry). A week later, researchers returned and asked participants to choose again, pretending not to remember the original choice.
Result: participants' actual choice on the day consistently skewed less healthy than the choice they'd predicted a week earlier — people could not accurately anticipate how their in-the-moment hunger state would shift their preference, even over just a one-week gap. Phill Agnew illustrates the same failure with his own resolution to run immediately after landing from a holiday, made while relaxed on a beach, then abandoned once actually jet-lagged. Mitigation: making a public pre-commitment (telling other people about the planned future decision in advance) measurably increases follow-through, since social accountability partially substitutes for accurately predicting one's future motivational state.
Discussed in
- Episode 280 — 280-when-you-can-t-stop-seeing-the-thing-you-ve-just-discovered