14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new scientific investigation, it would appear that people who have power, of any kind, tend to be more optimistic than their peers. But, while optimism was shown to be linked with a better state of the immune system, this comes with a disadvantage as well. The team behind the new study says that these people also tend to make more inaccurate time predictions, when it comes for example to determining how long it will take for them, or others, to complete an upcoming task, ScienceDaily reports.
The investigation was conducted by researchers in the United Kingdom, based at the University of Kent, and led by social psychologist Mario Weick. In a new paper accompanying the findings, the team details how the rate of accurate forecasts can drop considerably in the case of influential people. When powerful individuals set up their agendas, they apparently experience a much higher rate of false predictions than the average person. In fact, the team shows, they can be wrong in up to 70 percent of cases. More details of the study appear in an upcoming issue of the respected scientific Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.
“Time is a crucial factor in people's everyday lives. Whether they are teachers, policy makers or engineers, people routinely plan their work and estimate the time it will take to accomplish tasks. Interestingly, people often underestimate the time it takes to accomplish tasks. This bias is known as the planning fallacy and derives from a too narrow focus on the envisaged goal. The more people focus on what they want to achieve, the more they tend to neglect impediments, previous experiences and task subcomponents that are not readily apparent,” the team leader explains. Funding for the research came from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).
“As a result, time predictions are often inaccurate and too optimistic. Power tends to increase people's focus on intended outcomes. Although this can be beneficial, in the context of time planning we reasoned that power would lead to greater error in forecasts,” says Weick, who is also a UK School of Psychology research fellow. He adds that power appears to shift the very nature of the things people tend to focus on when planning ahead. This may be the root cause of the stronger bias they have for predicting the time necessary to complete an allotted task, and it may also explain why the fail so often.