Happy Birthday Spreadsheet
“The second distortion caused by conventional spreadsheets is more subtle. It’s described in a 1980s paper, written by university researcher Jeffrey Kottemann and others concerning what they called “Performance, Beliefs, and the Illusion of Control.” The paper described an experiment in which subjects were asked to perform a planning task using different tools, some of them with elaborate what-if capability and others without it.
The subjects whose tools invited them to imagine alternative scenarios believed they were doing a better job—even though statistical measures of their results showed no improvement in the actual quality of the forecasts. Those subjects did, however, take longer to perform the task.”