Guessing Another’s Hunger

Recently, I was asked to make an estimate for how much food I believed my hungry coworker would be able to eat. At the time of said estimate, I myself had recently eaten and hence I had very little of my own desire for food at that moment. Later on, I once again was asked to estimate how much food a coworker would want to eat; except this time the roles were switched- I was hungry and my coworker had recently eaten.

I will now ask you to guess how accurate my predictions were in each case.

Turns out, I was quite wrong in both of my predictions, however that alone wouldn’t be very interesting now, would it? (After all, maybe I am just bad at making predictions in general). However, what was quite interesting was the direction I was wrong in both of my predictions; with the first prediction (when I was full) being too low, and my second prediction (when I was hungry) being too high- it almost seems like my state of hunger at that moment may have influenced my predictions…

In my last post I discussed how projection bias led to me wasting pizza, and while what I discussed about projection bias in that article was true- it is only half of the story surrounding this bias.

To start this off, you will notice how my last post focused heavily on an individual projecting their state onto themselves in the future and while this is certainly an important topic to discuss, you may wonder if the mechanism behind projection bias also can lead to an individual mispredicting the behavior of another person- rather than just themselves.

For instance, imagine you just spent a long grueling day at work and naturally are very tired. If someone were to ask you how willing another person would be if they were not tired, you would very likely provide an estimate that is much lower than their true willingness. Furthermore, if you were instead asked when you were not tired, you would likely provide a much more accurate estimate regarding the willingness to work of someone who themselves is not tired; however, you would most likely overestimate the willingness to work of someone who is tired.

Naturally, this demonstrates an intuitive example of an effect similar to the one discussed in my last article on projection bias- and in fact this is projection bias as well. The notion of projecting our current state onto others is called Interpersonal Projection Bias, while projecting our current state onto ourselves in the future is called Intrapersonal Projection Bias.

So in summary projection bias affects more than just predictions one makes about themselves; it also affects the predictions one may make about others. Naturally, while it this case it only led to me being embarrassingly wrong regarding the hunger of my coworkers; it can be reasoned that this bias may lead to even worse outcomes in situations when one’s prediction is of more importance- such as when designing a policy that affects others. To this end, I find it important to recognize the influence our current state has, and to understand the true power this may have over us- afterall, we are beings who are heavily influenced by our current situations.