ch i V

re eAbstract The planning fallacy, or tendency to underestimate how long a task will take to complete, is a robust phenomenon. Although sev-eral explanations have been oVered (e.g., ignoring underestimations made in the past), we hypothesized that self-presentation con-cerns may also contribute to the bias, and that this eVect may be exacerbated by a previous failure to complete a task on time. Half of our sample (n D 85) were led to believe that they failed to complete an initial task on time, and half were not. Predictions were then made for time to complete a second task either verbally to a familiar experimenter (high self-presentation) or anonymously (low self-presentation). Although verbal predictions exhibited the typical planning fallacy, anonymous predictions did not. Additionally, ver-bal predictions were less accurate, that is, less correlated with actual completion times, than were anonymous predictions. There was no signiWcant diVerence in the bias as a result of the failure manipulation, nor was there an interaction between the self-presentation and failure conditions