Cognitive Dissonance

I recently read the book Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) . The authors relate the problems of cognitive dissonance. In particular, how in the face of clear evidence, we often deny that we made a mistake.

They discuss clinic psychology and repressed memory. They discuss police interrogation techniques and false prosecutions. They discuss how cognitive dissonance and self-justification can led from small problems in marriages to divorce, or from small acts of dishonesty to major crimes and fraud.

I suggest that project managers when faced with concrete evidence that project managers' cost and time estimates are wrong will find ways to protect their egos by self-justification. They will find reasons why this evidence does not apply to them. They will explain how their project will be different.

Furthermore, the authors provide evidence that people with the highest self-esteem will be the most likely to deny the evidence. These experts' estimates will not be any better but they will have much more confidence in their estimates.  They will hold more strongly to their original estimates in the face to evidence proving they are wrong.

The authors describe the training of police investigators who are trained using a manual on interrogation techniques that will help obtain a confession from the suspect. The manual provides suggestions on how to determine if a suspect is lying. However, in controlled experiments, those police investigators, who were trained with this manual, did no better than untrained university students at determining if a suspect was lying. The trained investigators were however much more confident that they had correctly distinguished the liars from those who were telling the truth.

This makes me wonder if the courses taught by the Project Management Institute using their Book of Knowledge do something similar. They give project managers more confidence in their estimates but not more accurate estimates.