3BI: time perception and psychological innovation
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Happy Monday to you all. I’m back after a few busy weeks with some behavioral musings on how psychology can impact our perception of time.
The Peak-End Effect
A classic behavioral economics bias is the Peak-End Effect (or Peak-End Rule):
When we’re evaluating an experience after the fact, the end of the experience and the peak of the experience (the most exciting or the most painful, for example) have an outsize influence.
Some classic studies demonstrated this in experiences like medical procedures that cause pain or discomfort. Think of taking off a band-aid. You can either rip it off and have more intense discomfort for a shorter period of time or slowly remove it for duller pain for a longer duration. In studies, people tend to prefer the latter over the former despite it having more overall pain. The level of intensity, or peak, and feeling at the end matters more.
A simpler example is entertainment like a TV show, book, or movie where our memories can be significantly impacted by the ending. Think of Game of Thrones, which was the biggest show in the world for years, but has been somewhat forgotten after a disastrous final season. In our minds, the ending overshadowed everything that led to it.
How can we feel so differently about something after the fact? Perhaps there are two distinct versions of ourself during and after experiences:
Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman coined a useful pair of phrases for talking about this sort of thing: the experiencing self and the remembering self. The experiencing self is the version of you who feels things from moment to moment. The remembering self is the version of you reflecting on past experiences. While your experiencing self has the most accurate read on how you feel, your remembering self gets the final word. And your remembering self is subject to the biases and distortions of human memory.
How we feel during something is not indicative of how we’ll remember it because we often value different factors at different times.
Read more at Psychology Today.
Not all waiting is the same
Time can feel differently in the moment, too. Technically, there’s no ambiguity in time. Seconds, minutes, hours, and days always move at the same pace. Time doesn’t feel like it passes by consistently in our heads, though.
This is especially true when we’re waiting. Consider when you land at the airport and have to get your checked luggage from baggage claim. From the NYT:
Some years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted.
Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags.
So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.
Another example of this is the Labor Illusion, when creating an appearance of effort is sufficient to increase perceptions of value in a service. When there’s some transparency into the effort behind a service, not only do we value it more, but we’re also willing to wait longer for it.
Harvard researchers Ryan Buell and Michael Norton demonstrated this in a series of experiments. In one example, people were randomly assigned to different versions of an online flight search tool similar to sites like Kayak, Google Flights, or Expedia:
An “instantaneous” condition where the search results were shown immediately.
A “blind” condition where all results populated after a wait and a blank screen was shown during the delay.
A “transparent” condition where the waiting screen displayed a continually changing list of which sites were being searched and showed an animation of the fares being compiled as they were “found” by the service.
The results given by the site were the same in each version, but were perceived much differently. The output from the transparent condition was rated higher than the blind despite the wait times being identical, and even compared favorably to the instantaneous version in which there was no wait at all. Transparency into the work behind the scenes not only made the wait more tolerable, but increased the perceived value of the results themselves.
It seems that we feel like time passes more quickly when we feel like it’s being used productively, either by us ( like walking vs standing at baggage claim) or for us (like watching search results populate on an online tool vs a blank waiting screen).
Read more at the NYT (HT to Matt Darling for sharing) and HBS.
Psychological vs Technological Innovation
The above are examples of how much opportunity for innovation lies in psychology rather than technology. When we think of improving experiences, we often default to a logical solutions driven by engineering when there may be cheaper and more effective ones rooted in psychology. From the great Rory Sutherland:
We are now, in many cases, competing with the laws of physics. The scramjet or the hyperloop might be potential moon-shots, but making land- or air travel-speeds so much faster is really hard problem - and comes with unforeseen dangers. By contrast, I think 'psychological moonshots' are comparatively easy. Making a train journey 20 per cent faster might cost hundreds of millions, but making it 20 per cent more enjoyable may cost almost nothing.
It seems likely that the biggest progress in the next 50 years may come not from improvements in technology but in psychology and design thinking. Put simply, it's easy to achieve massive improvements in perception at a fraction of the cost of equivalent improvements in reality.
Getting luggage to baggage claim faster may be technically challenging and expensive with diminishing returns, while improving the experience of the wait is simpler, cheaper, and often more effective. The quality of the journey really is more important than the speed to the destination in many cases.
Read more in Rory’s excellent book Alchemy.
Have a great week!