Do you really need that?
Are we really going to use that new widget on the top of our Christmas list as often as we think we are?
After months of interviewing "several hundred" students, they came up with an answer. No way. Their study, published in the journal Social Influence, found that nearly two thirds of the time people overestimate how much they will use that must-have gizmo. They don't use it half as much as they thought they would, and a perfect stranger could have told them that, the study contends.
Basically the study compared individual's estimates of how much they'd use something with estimates provided by a group of strangers, and the strangers' guesses were more accurate.