Why we're late ⌛
"The world makes much less sense than you think."
—Psychologist Daniel Kahneman
> delusional optimism | the truth about us
Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the lauded psychologists and Nobel Prize winners, helped discover decades ago why so many Americans were regularly late for work.
- By some estimates, it's one in five people.
- The psychological explanation nobody wants to hear is the so-called "planning fallacy," also known as the "optimism bias." 𝚿🧠
Kahneman and Tversky defined this cognitive bias in 1979 as "the tendency to underestimate the amount of time needed to complete a future task, due in part to the reliance on overly optimistic performance scenarios."
It's a naturally occurring tendency and not clear evidence of a worker's true value.
In addition to badly estimating how much time is needed to leave the house, we're not affected by past instances of getting it wrong. It’s a cognitive blindness or mental lapse, not a gesture of contempt.
Perceptions of late people nonetheless are usually negative.
But we’re not heartless.
"The punctually challenged are often excruciatingly aware and ashamed of the damage their lateness could do to their relationships, reputations, careers, and finances," the BBC reported in 2017.
A late arriver could still be indispensable to your business. There's no plain correlation between productivity and showing up late. But our feelings and emotions tell us there is.
The planning fallacy doesn't just apply to people who are late. It can affect even the senior executives of elite Wall Street companies.
Wrote Daniel Kahneman in 2003 for the Harvard Business Review:
>> "Managers are prone to the illusion that they are in control. Sometimes they will explicitly deny the role of chance in the outcome of their plans. They see risk as a challenge to be met by the exercise of skill. And they believe results are determined purely by their own actions and those of their organizations."
- next time "Noisy billboards and vivid, busy ads."
- listening Texas is the Reason "Back and to the Left"
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