Humans overpromise on physical tasks because the brain erases the time it takes to plan a movement.
People consistently overestimate their ability to complete actions within a time limit because of a premotor phase glitch. The brain accurately tracks how long a physical movement takes, but it compresses the perceived duration of the mental planning stage. This error makes us feel like we have more time than we actually do when faced with a deadline. We fail to account for the internal setup time required before our muscles even begin to move. This explains why we often wait until the last second to act and then fail to finish on time.
Can I Reach It in Time? Temporal Compression of the Premotor Phase Biases Judgments of Action Possibility
SSRN · 6719150
Humans continuously estimate whether an action can be completed within a limited time window, yet the mechanisms underlying such implicit evaluations remain unclear. Across three experiments (N = 52 in total), we used a novel psychophysical paradigm to quantify reachability judgments in an arm-reaching task. Participants consistently judged actions as possible even when the available time was shorter than their actual execution time, indicating an overestimation of time-constrained reachability.