Why not buy that treadmill? You'll be exercising every day, right? A new studyin the Journal of Consumer Research examines why our expectations of ourbehavior so often don't match reality.
Authors Robin J. Tanner (University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Kurt A. Carlson(Duke University) uncovered a specific process that they believe contributes tounrealistic optimism. They also suggest a method to encourage consumers tothink more realistically about their future actions.
"Consumers adopt the tentative hypothesis that they will behave in an idealfashion when predicting their future behavior," the authors explain. "Unrealisticoptimism by consumers may have negative consequences for both marketers andconsumers. For example, if a consumer holds unrealistically optimistic beliefsabout how often they will work out in the future, then they may overpay for homeexercise equipment."
In a series of studies, the authors first had participants provide idealized estimatesfor particular behaviors (e.g., In an ideal world, how often would you exercisenext week?) Then they asked participants to provide a second estimate (e.g. Howoften will you exercise next week?). They found that when people are first askedto predict what would happen in an ideal world, then asked how they actuallyexpect to do, they are more realistic.
Interestingly, when researchers explicitly instructed participants not to beidealistic, the experiment backfired and led to even more unrealistic estimates.
Also, the authors found that more decisive people were less realistic.
"An important potential consequence of being overly optimistic about one'sfuture behavior is that such optimistic beliefs may contribute to overbuying ofproducts that see little use," the authors write.