Intention-Behavior Gap
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The planning fallacy refers to our research-supported tendency to underestimate the amount of time it will take to complete a task, the costs involved with that task, and the benefits we will enjoy as a result of having completed it.
This is part of why construction costs so frequently overshoot their estimates, and why students underestimate how long it will take to write a paper and overestimate how good it will feel to turn that paper in.
Interestingly, we tend to do the opposite when gauging future outcomes for other people.
When we’re projecting how long it will take someone else to build a house or write a paper, we’re more inclined to view the situation through a pessimistic lens. This is a direct contrast to the optimistic lens we use when prognosticating about our own outcomes; a tendency that’s thought to be the result of a kind of availability heuristic that causes us to focus on the most positive outcomes we’ve experienced or nearly experienced in the past, alongside a self-serving bias that can cause us to remember the most generous interpretations of our past behaviors more readily than the most objective or negative interpretations of the same.
The planning fallacy is just one element of a larger concept called the Intention-Behavior Gap, which is a relatively recently proposed area of research—much of what we know about the subject is derived from studies and meta-analyses done from the late-1980s, onward—that endeavors to explain the gap between intended achievement and actual achievement, specifically in people who are keen to accomplish something, and who are aware of this keenness, but who nonetheless fail to live up to their ambitions.
The aforementioned planning fallacy can contribute to this failure by causing us to assume incorrect dimensions for a given undertaking.
We might decide to learn to speak another language, and assume, based on other things we’ve learned in the past, that it’ll take mere months to achieve near-fluency. That estimation, which is unlikely, no matter how good we might be at learning other sorts of things, could result in a misalignment of expectation and reality that drains us of enthusiasm and willpower, when—months after we begin our education—we’re still fumbling through the rudiments of our chosen target tongue.
Evidence thus far suggests that it’s more ideal to approach goals that are framed with specificity in terms of outcome, that focus on broad-based mastery over performance, and which are outlined in a pessimistic manner, which provides us with the opportunity to surprise ourselves with comparable over-performance on a regular basis; under-promise, over-deliver, in other words.
Another aspect of the gap between aspirations and accomplishment relates to the origins of our aspirations.
Self-determination theory says, in essence, that intrinsic motivations tend to lead to more positive outcomes than extrinsic motivations—the former being the desire to do something because we think it’s cool or interesting, or because we desire the sense of growth and increased perception we’ll gain from learning or accomplishing it, while the latter refers to motivations from outside variables, like the desire to earn more money, to impress someone, or to be perceived a certain way by society as a whole.
Intrinsically motivated intentions seem to be more likely to lead to the realization of those intentions than those that are predicated on external factors.
So the pursuit of personal autonomy, of competence, of a sense of affiliation with larger causes and ideas: goals predicated on these types of growth are more likely to be accomplished, based on the research that’s been done in this space.
The pursuit of goals, knowledge, or other accomplishments that we believe will make others see us in a particular way, will gain us wealth or notoriety, or that will elevate us above others in a given social hierarchy, in contrast, seem to be a lot less likely to result in the same level of achievement.
Some research has also shown that a reflexive reversion to existing norms can make such growth tricky, as can a fear of failure, which could be construed as a desire to avoid danger: in this case the threat posed to one’s self-perception and/or one’s social position, in both cases risking one’s implied status as someone who is capable and successful by attempting something at which one might fail.
There’s evidence which indicates that constructing if-then plans can lessen this preemptive concern over permanently staining oneself with failure, working through possible negative outcomes and then determining ahead of time what the ideal response will be if things go sideways in a particular fashion.
Reframing an endeavor as the pursuit of mastery over a particular metric of success seems to help with the internal component of that problem, helping us perceive failure as just one more step along the way to our goals, and perhaps even as a vital component of that growth.
Tracking our progress in ways that are relevant to self-determinism may also help us stay the course through the inevitable difficult, strenuous portions of a goal-pursuing journey, helping to stoke our internal ambitions rather than relying on the more immediate but often less long-lasting energy boosts offered up by external factors.
There’s also evidence that suggests mindfulness and working memory training, alongside overall psychological and neurological health regimens, like daily, moderate workouts and some kind of meditation or meditation-adjacent practice, may help us maintain a more stable and reliable sense of self-in-context, which could help us, in turn, more accurately assess the dimensions of future endeavors by allowing us to more accurately recollect past experiences and more realistically perceive our own traits, skills, accomplishments, and potential—diminishing some of the downsides of the planning fallacy, as a result.
The distance between desire and accomplishment can be vast, and although there are a great many social, psychological, and infrastructural variables influencing an individual’s success rate when it comes to translating a goal into a reality, there are a great many perceptual influences on this process, as well.
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