Chicago Booth Review Podcast Does Your Brain Think Accurately About Time?

Kristin Donnelly: Duration is a scalar magnitude, which means that it is a quantity that accumulates from zero. And like all quantities, it's subject to diminishing sensitivity. That means that the distance between one and two feels larger than the distance between 11 and 12.

Hal Weitzman: Let's imagine it's one o'clock. Would you rather wait for 30 minutes or until 1:30? Yes, they're the same, but research suggests that people tend to feel that 30 minutes will take longer. What does that tell us about how our brains think about time? Welcome to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, where we bring you groundbreaking academic research in a clear and straightforward way. I'm Hal Weitzman. Today, I'm talking with Chicago Booth's Kristin Donnelly about her research on time duration asymmetry. Why is it that we think differently about waiting times depending on how they're presented? Kristin Donnelly, welcome back to the Chicago Booth Review Podcast.

Kristin Donnelly: Thank you so much for having me.

Hal Weitzman: Well, we're delighted to have you back because we had such fun with you last time talking about your research on videos and how we watch them again and again, and they seem more premeditated every time. We have to be back to talk about your research on the time duration asymmetry. That's a big term. Just tell us what that means.

Kristin Donnelly: Yeah. So any interval of time can be expressed with duration. Let's say it's 6:00 PM now, I could say, "Your table will be ready in 30 minutes." Or I could use a temporal coordinate. I could say, "Your table will be ready at 6:30." And those are two very different ways to express the same thing, and they're used interchangeably a lot across many, many different parts of society.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah, we would not think that there is much difference between your table will be ready in 30 minutes or your table will be ready at 6:30.

Kristin Donnelly: Right.

Hal Weitzman: But what is the difference?

Kristin Donnelly: So what we find is that for a large swath of everyday consumer decisions, which are involving shorter periods, 30 minutes, two hours, a day, whatever, duration frames feel longer. Duration frames make the period feel longer than clock timeframes or date frames. And this builds on some existing work on date frames feeling longer, but we have a broader theory about why this is, and we extend it to clock time, which is a neglected part of the literature.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. So just to be clear, it's the duration, it feels longer?

Kristin Donnelly: Yes.

Hal Weitzman: The 30 minutes versus 6:30.

Kristin Donnelly: Right. 30 minutes will feel longer.

Hal Weitzman: Is that right? Which is fascinating because I think I was on hold with my bank and they're like, "Your call will be answered in eight minutes." And eight minutes felt like from now until the end of time.

Kristin Donnelly: So that is consistent. I'll also say this is all about prospective time. So if you are in the moment experiencing eight minutes passing, it will not be experienced any differently according to our research. We have no reason to think that that eight minutes would feel any different if you're thinking about it as eight minutes versus if you're thinking about it as in clock time terms. But when you are scheduling stuff, when you're thinking ahead, "Okay, I'm going to be there in 15 minutes," whatever it is, this is prospective duration, how people think about intervals in the abstract and future.

Hal Weitzman: I see. So you can't help me with the being on hold with the bank.

Kristin Donnelly: No, I'm sorry.

Hal Weitzman: But if I said I'll be there in 15 minutes, then that feels like that 15 minutes takes longer than me saying I'll be there at 1:15 or whatever.

Kristin Donnelly: It feels to you like there's more time.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah, right. Exactly. Okay. So yeah, I've got all the time. So if I want to have all the time in the world, I should give the durations as I'm always late to everything, so maybe that would be a trick I could use. And the other part of this is that... Well, let me ask you as a question. 60 minutes versus one hour, how does that affect this equation or this dynamic?

Kristin Donnelly: Yeah, so there's existing research on the unit effect, which finds that 60 minutes would feel longer than one hour. Generally speaking, the more granular the unit, the larger the magnitude feels. So 12 inches feels longer than one foot, that kind of thing, in principle, according to the unit effect. So that's another layer of how people perceive magnitude more generally, that would be on top of whatever's going on with how duration is framed.

Hal Weitzman: Now we're waiting for stuff all the time. You talked about a dinner reservation or whatever, or it sounded like, unless I'm getting a table delivered, but I assume that you were talking about a table that I'm waiting to eat dinner at.

Kristin Donnelly: Yeah, yeah.

Hal Weitzman: What are some of the implications of this basic time duration asymmetry for organizations?

Kristin Donnelly: Yeah, so organizations have a choice in how they frame intervals to their consumer. They can use clock time, they can use duration, a lot of them. Now some organizations need to use one frame or the other, and I totally respect that. But in cases where they have some flexibility, I would say it's important to figure out whether the consumer wants the period to get over with quickly or they want to extend it. So if we are thinking about, you're offering a service like a massage or something, maybe that feels more appealing when you express it in terms of duration. If you're offering a service like a dental cleaning, maybe you want to get over with faster.

Hal Weitzman: Or a surgery, yeah, it'll be over by-

Kristin Donnelly: Yeah, something like that. Although there's other competing things, like I want them to do a good job with the surgery or the dental cleaning. But my point is that with a lot of services, we have choice in how we frame things and in a lot of cases we're talking about wait times. And I would say using clock time instead of duration would be my recommendation if it is appropriate given the constraints of the business.

Hal Weitzman: Right. I mean, it'd be hard for the bank to say, "Well, your call will be answered by 1:00 PM." You'd be struggling to think about when that... It would be more confusing probably than enlightening. Okay, so this is your framework. How is it different? Is it new? How does it relate to traditionally how we think of intertemporal choice?

Kristin Donnelly: Intertemporal choice is downstream of this. We have some things in the paper that have to do with intertemporal choice in the context of delivery choices and things like this. But intertemporal choice is, it's like, do you want this thing now or this thing later? And that's a pretty fundamental thing and it is definitely present in a lot of everyday consumer decision-making, but so is the single evaluation of how much time do I have to do something before X happens? Or how fast is this seminar going to be? That kind of thing. So I would say that our paradigm extends it and also provides a theoretical explanation for existing work on date delay differences where they found that people are more impatient when thinking about waits framed in terms of delay compared to date. We think that we have a all-encompassing theory for why that happens as well as why what we're documenting with clock time happens, and it has to do with scalar magnitude representation.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. Tell us more about that. What's your explanation?

Kristin Donnelly: Duration is a scalar magnitude, which means that it is a quantity that accumulates from zero. And like all quantities, it's subject to diminishing sensitivity. That means that the distance between one and two feels larger than the distance between 11 and 12. This is a property of all types of magnitude in our world. If I give you two weights, I give you one pound weight, two pound weight, you may be able to tell the difference between them, but if I give you a 13 pound weight and a 14 pound weight, it feels-

Hal Weitzman: That makes sense.

Kristin Donnelly: Right. So what we find or what we try to argue here mathematically is that duration has a different shape in terms of how it is represented. And it is compressive in nature, meaning that as you move along, the units that are adjacent next to each other in the duration mapping feel closer together. And when you have that same magnitude, because duration is a magnitude, expressed via temporal coordinates like clock time, you reduce some of that compressive scaling. And all of what we found falls out mathematically from the simple assumption that duration is more compressive than clock time expressions.

Hal Weitzman: So is clock time more accurate then? Is it more accurate representation of the world of what's really happening?

Kristin Donnelly: I actually don't have a good answer for that because it will depend a lot on expectations and whether someone is over underestimating anything to begin with. It's very hard to say.

Hal Weitzman: I get it. But basically this research is telling us a lot about how our brains work and how we... We were talking with Josh, our producer before the episode about how time is not real. But the brain constructs time, right?

Kristin Donnelly: Yes.

Hal Weitzman: And the experience of time obviously is not, I mean, we know that. The experience of time is not the same for different people. So this is about the construction of time and not the measurement of time, correct?

Kristin Donnelly: Right. It's about how you take a given time expression and try to get a sense of what it means, how big it is in your own mind.

Hal Weitzman: Okay. And you talk about, so as you said, clocks, calendars, these dilutes or they change this mental compression that we feel when we're looking at time. So just unpack that a tiny bit more. So what exactly? So I understand the compression part, that makes perfect sense. You described it with the weights. How is it undoing that?

Kristin Donnelly: So what we propose, and this is something that it's not like I can test it formally, but what our theory says is that when you have things like calendars or clock time, you're basically expressing the duration, the magnitude, the temporal interval in terms of regularly experienced coordinates on this structured scaffold. We routinely experience 1:00 PM, 2:00 PM, 3:00 PM and so on. And I want to back up a second and say, clock time and calendar dates, they're not numeric in nature truly. 1:00 PM is not greater than 12:00 PM. It's different. We have this abstract continuum of time that we have sectioned into various chunks, 60 minutes here, 12 months here, and we as humans have wrangled that for communication purposes and otherwise. But imposing that structure onto this continuum of time means that we have this regularly re-experienced familiar positions and those positions anchor the magnitude that we're providing via the clock time expression, and it means that they're more stable in their spacing psychologically as you go up the number line.

Hal Weitzman: Does that make sense? An hour is an hour regardless of when it occurs.

Kristin Donnelly: Exactly. Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Right, okay. I'm wondering, does this change with 24 hours? If you go to Europe with a 24 hour-

Kristin Donnelly: We tried that.

Hal Weitzman: Yeah, there's a change?

Kristin Donnelly: We tried that. Yeah. So no, it does not. So we actually had a question that I thought was interesting. Imagine a period that starts at 0:00, midnight, and goes for 30 minutes, versus goes until 00:30. Those two expressions are, on a surface level, very equivalent. However, we still see the effect to the same degree when you express it like that compared to when you express it as 12:00 AM. And so what we think this means is that yes, 24-hour time does have more of a, shall I say, numeric flavor to it, but it still is psychologically, I would argue, a category scaffold type situation. And it does repeat. Every day it refreshes. Any other thing, any other magnitude just keeps going up.

Hal Weitzman: Right, you don't go to 25:00.

Kristin Donnelly: Right. The only thing that is actually a temporal coordinate that is accumulative and represents magnitude is years. And that's years that have collapsed since the birth of Christ or whatever.

Hal Weitzman: Have you ever wondered what goes on inside a black hole or why time only moves in one direction? Or what is really so weird about quantum mechanics? You should listen to Why This Universe? On this podcast, you'll hear about the strangest and most interesting ideas in physics broken down by physicist Dan Hooper and Shalma Wegsman. If you want to learn about our universe from the quantum to the cosmic, you won't want to miss Why This Universe? Part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. Kristin Donnelly, in the first half, we talked about your research about the small subject of time and how we think about time, how we package time up. I was fascinated to see that you did research on those annoying capture tasks where you have to prove that you're a human by identifying all the kittens or whatever, the cookies or whatever. Tell us about what you did with those.

Kristin Donnelly: Yeah, it was just in service of a bigger question. The bigger question was, in a situation where someone is making a decision about whether to engage in an activity or not, in our case, whether to solve these CAPTCHAs or not, would the way that we frame the time needed to do them change whether they were willing to participate? So to give a less convoluted answer, we asked participants to complete this random product categorization task. It didn't matter. But the key was at the end of the survey we said, "Okay, we're going to have you complete a new task if you want to, we're inviting you to, where you have to solve CAPTCHAs for two minutes."

And it was either described as for two minutes or until the participant's time. So we had their current time piped in via their IP address at the top of the page, and we just simply added two minutes to that. And why we ran this study was, we were trying to see whether financially incentivized decisions change as a function of framing, and we found that they did. So 74% of participants agreed to participate in this subsequent task, solving CAPTCHAs, when the task was described as, for the next two minutes, and then 81% agreed when it was described by the clock time.

Hal Weitzman: So a larger group would agree to do it when it was the clock time.

Kristin Donnelly: The clock time, right, because it sounded shorter.

Hal Weitzman: Right. And so that works with the study you were telling us about earlier. So I have a question about our perception. What happens to our perception when an interval becomes significantly long? What does significantly long mean?

Kristin Donnelly: Don't have a good answer for you. What we find in our studies is that because of the compressive shape for duration and the diluted compression for start end expressions like clock time or dates, there exists a point at which you start to see the opposite happen where clock time will feel longer than duration. And we find that that's somewhere around 13 hours or so, but I can't say, it probably depends on the context, et cetera. But this is interesting to us because all of this falls out mathematically from our models of how people are compressing magnitude across different intervals. And so we do find this reversal when you get to a large enough interval, you see the opposite. And this is precisely because clock time and categorical scaffolding allows for better psychological resolution as you move up the scale.

Hal Weitzman: Meaning, sorry, just explain that. What's psychological resolution?

Kristin Donnelly: Remember how I said earlier how the distance between 13 and 14 felt smaller than the distance between one and two. 13 and 14 have less psychological resolution. This gets even more extreme when you go further up, like 56 and 57 versus six and seven, whatever. There's less psychological resolution. But what we mean by that is that they're closer together in the mind. They're less distinguishable. They feel more similar to each other. And when you have clock time or dates, this regular re-experienced scaffolding allows us to feel like this, like we don't have as much compression, we don't have as much of this reduced psychological distance between units as things get larger. So because of durations' compressive shape, it naturally tapers off to where eventually clock time starts feeling longer.

Hal Weitzman: I mean, I feel like there's a lot of research on this, that crossing a category like an hour or a month changes how long a period feels. So a week between February and March feels longer, if we're scheduling it feels longer than a week within March or whatever. Just talk a little bit about that and how that relates to your research.

Kristin Donnelly: That is my previous research on category crossing, so it's awesome that you know of that. Amazing. Cool. So essentially what we find is that periods feel longer when they span more temporal categories. 1:30 to 3:00 feels longer than 1:00 to 2:30 to people. This relates to left digit bias when you see in pricing, right? 4.99 feels disproportionately lower than $5, despite the one cent difference. That one cent difference feels smaller between 4.98 and 4.99. Similar psychology is going on with time, we argue. However, we think that this has nothing to do with left digits. It has to do with categorization and attending to the highest level category that differentiates start and end time. But for our purposes, in terms of application, the thing to take away is simply time periods that cross more categories feel longer than those that span fewer.

Hal Weitzman: I'm sure that a lot of people listening to this is saying, "This is absolutely... My mind is blown, but what am I going to do with this?" A lot of organizations have to manage wait in some form, all kinds of waiting. How should they think about using your frameworks, your findings, to manage the situation better?

Kristin Donnelly: I think that the first question to ask themselves is, is this period that I'm expressing, this temporal period, is it something that the consumer wants to get over with or is it something that they want to extend? Is it something they want to expedite or luxuriate in? And most things will probably fall into the category of, they want to get it over with. Most things involve wait times. And so if the goal is to reduce the perceived length of the wait, I would say my recommendation would be to use clock time if it's appropriate given their constraints. If it's not appropriate, let's say that they need to use duration for whatever reason, they can add clock time. And just adding clock time even in a small visual side thing will help to make that period feel faster.

Hal Weitzman: Even if you give both?

Kristin Donnelly: Yes.

Hal Weitzman: I see.

Kristin Donnelly: So it's a dampening of the effect, so that's helpful. So if you want to make time feel faster. There may be cases where the company wants to make time feel longer. Maybe they want to deter people from choosing priority delivery because they don't have enough drivers on the road to fulfill that, something like that. Then you could see them moving more toward, okay, we're going to express everything in terms of duration and that would make things feel longer. So it really depends on their goals and whether it's something that the consumer wants to get over with or not. And then category crossing as well.

Hal Weitzman: Right, of course. So I'm going to tell you it's a week between February and March, right?

Kristin Donnelly: Right. Yeah.

Hal Weitzman: Okay, excellent. Kristin Donnelly, this has been absolutely fascinating. Again, I hope we don't have to wait too long to have you back.

Kristin Donnelly: Thank you so much for inviting me.

Hal Weitzman: I'm trying to think what the best way of framing that is, but hopefully it won't be too long before we have you back on the Chicago Booth Review Podcast. Thank you so much.

Kristin Donnelly: Thank you so much. It's a pleasure.

Hal Weitzman: That's it for this episode of the Chicago Booth Review Podcast, part of the University of Chicago Podcast Network. For more research, analysis and insights, visit our website at chicagobooth.edu/review. When you're there, sign up for our weekly newsletter so you never miss the latest in business-focused academic research. This episode was produced by Josh Stunkel. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe and please do leave us a five-star review. Until next time, I'm Hal Weitzman. Thanks for listening.