PhronesisThe planning fallacy — the systematic tendency to underestimate the time, cost, and effort required to complete future tasks while overestimating the likelihood of success — is among the best-replicated findings in behavioural decision research. But the single-instance planning fallacy, which affects nearly everyone, is distinct from the chronic planning fallacy: the stable, trans-domain pattern in which a person's estimates are always optimistic, their plans are always constructed from best-case simulations of ideal execution, and their repeated experience of deadline failure and commitment breakdown produces no lasting revision to the estimation process.
This paper applies the Displacement Framework to characterise chronic planning fallacy as a wrong attractor W_CCPF organised around optimism-compulsion: the structural disposition to plan from the inside view, to encode the best-case estimate as both prediction and motivational commitment, and to compartmentalise past overruns so that they are not incorporated into future estimates.
The ground state S^0 — calibrated temporal realism — is defined as the capacity to estimate task durations and project timelines using reference-class forecasting: attending to the base rate of how similar tasks have actually gone rather than to an inside-view simulation of how the current task could ideally go. Three interlocking mechanisms maintain the optimism-compulsion basin: inside-view dominance, optimism-as-commitment encoding, and past-failure compartmentalisation.
The central formal result is the Planning Paradox: chronic best-case planning, which is organised to motivate and commit, systematically produces the failure experiences — overrun, broken commitments, overwhelm, eroded credibility — that most damage the agent's confidence, relational trust, and capacity to commit in the future. Nine formal propositions characterise the structure of the attractor, its mechanisms, and the return paths available through reference-class training, pre-mortem practice, implementation intention planning, and the decoupling of estimation from motivation.
The paper provides a formal account of why the planning fallacy resists correction even when the agent has direct access to their own history of overruns.