What is covered, week by week, and which topics each lecture draws on.
Every lecture the course claims to run gets a dated page and a teaching-team
reference. A course decides how many lectures it needs; one of them carries a
real deck. related: connects lectures to the sessions and assessments they
feed.
Five Minutes
Why the same five minutes on a clock can feel like nothing or like forever — and the two different ways people end up judging how long a wait took.
Week 1 · 22 February 2027
Watching the Clock
Why paying attention to a wait can make it feel shorter for one person and longer for another — and why the direction depends on the same forewarning distinction Week 1 introduced.
Week 2 · 1 March 2027
How Long Did You Expect?
Why a wait that runs six minutes late isn't the same thing as a six-minute wait — and what your log's "Expected wait" field has been quietly recording since Week 1.
Week 3 · 8 March 2027
Tell Me Where I Stand
Why telling someone how long they have left, or where they stand in a queue, can change how a wait is evaluated without changing how long it's judged to have taken.
Week 4 · 15 March 2027
The Progress Bar
What a progress bar's own behaviour communicates about an unfolding wait, and what Harrison et al.'s controlled comparison actually measured when they varied that behaviour under a fixed duration.
Week 5 · 22 March 2027
The Room
How a waiting environment can affect the evaluation of a wait through affect and mood, without necessarily changing how long the wait is perceived to have taken.
Week 6 · 29 March 2027
Who Goes Next?
Why the way a queue is arranged can lower how fair it feels to wait in it — even when nobody was actually served out of turn.
Week 7 · 5 April 2027
Who Doesn't Have to Wait?
Priority doesn't remove waiting from a system — it reallocates it between classes of people, and what that reallocation does depends on facts a published policy rarely tells you.
Week 8 · 12 April 2027
What's It Worth?
Why a wait is judged against what it buys you — sometimes the service itself, sometimes an explicit trade a system builds on purpose — and why neither of those is the same thing as who gets served first.
Week 9 · 19 April 2027
What You Can Do About It
Why a wait can keep the same clock duration, the same disclosed information, and the same structure while one thing still changes — whether the person waiting has any meaningful choice over whether, when, or how they remain in it — and what one service-encounter study on perceived control does, and doesn't, tell us about that.
Week 10 · 26 April 2027
Looking Without Asking
Why the four mechanisms your own log could report on directly turn into open, sometimes unanswerable questions once you're standing outside someone else's wait — and the two separate questions, kept apart, that let you say "cannot determine" or "undetermined" honestly instead of guessing.
Week 11 · 3 May 2027
What You Can Actually Say
A hypothetical café charges $2 to skip the queue. That's two mechanisms, not one undifferentiated feeling — and whether they're connected to each other is a separate claim from whether either is present at all. This week closes the toolkit — the audited system's own control mechanism, classified for the first time, and the relationships between mechanisms, read only where the evidence actually supports reading them.
Week 12 · 10 May 2027