In this line of research, I am examining people’s beliefs about the potential consequences of making inaccurate predictions about their own future.  For example, my research has found that people generally think that overly optimistic predictions can have motivational advantages, but that these advantages give way to the risk of disappointment later on if one’s predictions can be compared to reality.  Such concerns about the costs and benefits of “unrealistic” optimism and pessimism may influence people’s behavior, most notably by contributing to optimistic and pessimistic biases in their predictions.  My data reveal that manipulating the cognitive accessibility of consequences favoring optimistic versus pessimistic errors can change the degree to which people commit common forecasting biases.

 

 

Strategic Forecasts and Regulatory Focus

 

In a related vein of research, my collaborators and I are studying the relationship between regulatory focus and the perceived consequences of prediction errors.  To date, we have found that promotion-focused individuals tend to show stronger preferences for making optimistic errors than do prevention-focused individuals (using the methods described above).  Furthermore, promotion-focused individuals are less likely than prevention-focused individuals to shift their preferences toward making more pessimistic performance predictions after receiving potentially threatening feedback about a prior performance.  Currently, several additional studies are underway to further investigate the relationship between regulatory focus and people’s strategic preferences for committing optimistic versus pessimistic errors when making personal predictions.

 

 

Imaginary Obstacles to Goal Attainment

 

In this line of research, I am interested in the relationship between people’s goals, expectations, motivation, and performance.  When an individual has a performance goal (e.g., to give a successful presentation), a variety of expectations become relevant: For example, one might consider how difficult it will be to attain one’s goal, how much effort one will (or should) exert to overcome such difficulties, and how successful one will be in ultimately attaining the goal.  In several studies, I am examining the hypothesis that people may become overly pessimistic about the difficulty of goal-attainment as a way to motivate themselves to exert greater self-control and engage in goal-consistent behavior (e.g., rehearsing for one’s presentation).  However, in contrast to research on “defensive pessimism” (e.g., Norem & Cantor, 1986), people may overrate the difficulty of goal-attainment while still remaining optimistic about the final outcome, as long as they (perhaps also optimistically) believe that they will exert the extra effort necessary to overcome the extreme challenge that they think awaits them.

 

 

 

This project examines how perceptions about the consequences of error influence people’s decisions about whether to pursue and entrepreneurial or investment opportunity.  There are two major types of error that (would-be) entrepreneurs can commit: “failed entry” (i.e., getting involved in a venture that ultimately fails) and “missed opportunity” (i.e., passing on a venture ultimately is—or would have been—successful).  Our data suggest that nascent entrepreneurs may often be more concerned with one type of error than the other.  In one study, the majority of participants (MBA students enrolled in an Entrepreneurism class) revealed a greater tolerance for committing errors of failed entry than errors of missed opportunity.  Our theory predicts that these asymmetries should relate to people’s tendency to “over-” or “under-engage” in entrepreneurial opportunities (as suggested by success rates alone).  Current investigations are underway to examine this relationship, and to demonstrate that manipulating the salience of consequences favoring failed entry vs. missed opportunity can influence potential entrepreneurs’ decisions about whether to engage in a new venture.

Collaborator: Zach Burns

 

In a new line of research that is still in its early stages, I am examining the relationship between construal level (Trope & Liberman, 2003) and the perceived value of convenience products and services (e.g., dishwashers, maid services).  When construed at a high level, convenience products tend to mean the same thing as their alternative.  For example, using a dishwasher and washing dishes by hand both serve the function of getting the dishes clean.  However, when construed at a low level, convenience products are much more appealing than their inconvenient alternatives.  Preliminary data suggest that, consistent with our hypotheses, people value convenience products and services more—and are willing to pay more for them—when they construe them in low-level rather than high-level terms.

 

Common wisdom asserts that “time flies when you’re having fun.”  Building off such observations, scholars have long been interested in how psychological experiences influence time perception (e.g., Conti, 2001; Harton, 1939; James, 1890/1983).  In this line of research, I am examining the reverse causal hypothesis: that the perceived passage of time influences psychological experience.  Specifically, my research in this area suggests that people rate experiences more favorably—and are more likely to pursue such experiences further—when time seemed to pass rapidly than when it seemed to pass slowly.  Our data suggest that the process that drives this effect is one of (an often false) inference: When people notice that time has passed more quickly than we thought, they try to make sense of why their time perception was distorted.  Most of the time, the explanation that people most easily come up with is that time must have flown because they were enjoying themselves (of course, the opposite is true if time passes more slowly than one thought).

 

 

Goal-setting, Effort, and Satisfaction with Personal Performance

 

This line of research really involves judgments of the future (goals) as well as the past (satisfaction with performance).  When striving to attain a goal, individuals tend to attend to their performance relative to that goal rather than their absolute performance.  Evidence suggests that effort towards achievement will continue until the marginal satisfaction of approaching the goal equals the marginal cost of expending the necessary effort.  Goals also play a role in determining the final satisfaction experienced for a given performance level, by partitioning possible outcomes into regions of success and failure.  In contrast with past research emphasizing the attention placed on performance relative to a goal, my collaborators and I hypothesize that absolute performance comes to dominate individual’s evaluations as performance becomes increasingly in the distant past.  It is hypothesized that attention will shift, post-outcome, from relative performance to absolute performance.  Ultimate satisfaction will thus be derived from an individual’s absolute performance, independent of the goal, and constituting a bias in predictions of satisfaction with performance.