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.
Five minutes standing in a queue with nothing to look at, five minutes on hold with music, and five minutes waiting for a friend who is already visible down the street — a stopwatch would call all three identical. Ask the person doing the waiting, and they won’t.
That gap is what this course studies. Not “why does time feel weird” in general, but specifically: why the number a clock produces and the number a person reports need not agree, and what causes them to diverge in one direction rather than another.
Two durations, not one#
Keep two different quantities apart from the start:
- Clock duration — what a stopwatch would say. Five minutes is five minutes, regardless of who is waiting or how it felt.
- Judged duration — the duration a person reports or produces as their estimate of how long a wait took, whether that estimate is made during the interval or only produced afterwards, in whatever unit or comparison they’d naturally reach for (“maybe ten minutes,” “about twice as long as it should have been”). It is an estimate of length, not a report of how the wait felt emotionally — that belongs in the log’s outcome/notes field, not here. Judged duration is one part of what makes a wait feel short or unbearable, not the sole determinant of it.
The rest of the course is, in one sense, an extended argument about what can change the experience and judgement of a wait without simply changing the time that passes.
When the judgement is made changes what it measures#
There’s a second distinction underneath the first, and it matters more than it looks. A person can arrive at a duration judgement in two different circumstances:
- Prospectively — the person has been forewarned, before the wait begins, that a duration judgement of it will be required. That forewarning is what defines the prospective paradigm — not any particular behaviour during the wait. Someone forewarned is making a prospective judgement whether they spend the wait checking a phone, reading, or staring at nothing; watching a clock doesn’t make a judgement prospective, and not watching one doesn’t make it retrospective.
- Retrospectively — the person was not forewarned. No duration judgement was anticipated while the wait was happening; the estimate is only produced once asked, afterwards, and has to be reconstructed from memory rather than tracked as it happened. “How long do you think that meeting ran?”, asked the next day with no warning it was coming, is a retrospective question.
These are two different experimental paradigms, defined only by that forewarning — not two ways of describing the same measurement.
The empirical finding. Block and Zakay’s meta-analytic review of twenty experiments comparing the two paradigms found that prospective judgements come out longer, and less variable from person to person, than retrospective judgements of an equivalent duration (Block & Zakay, 1997). That is a pattern found across those studies, not something forewarning mechanically produces in any single case: the size of the difference varies, and other factors — starting with how much attention the wait itself demands of the person — can narrow, widen, or in some conditions reverse it. That moderation by attentional or information-processing demand is next week’s problem, not this one; for now, treat the finding as a documented tendency, not a formula.
Their interpretation, offered as an explanation for that finding rather than as an established fact on its own: an attentional account of prospective judgement (forewarning invites monitoring something like a mental clock, which competes with whatever attention the rest of the wait would otherwise get) against a memory-based account of retrospective judgement (there is no running record, so the estimate has to be reconstructed afterwards from whatever can be recalled about the wait).
Two things follow, and both matter for how you’ll use this course’s central method:
- Whether a person was forewarned that a duration judgement would be needed isn’t a neutral detail — it’s what determines which paradigm applies, and the two paradigms produce systematically different numbers.
- Forewarning, not behaviour during the wait, is what separates a prospective judgement from a retrospective one. Two people can spend an identical wait doing identical things and still be in different paradigms, if only one of them knew in advance they’d be asked to judge it.
Why this matters#
The course’s thesis is that waiting is an experience, not merely a duration. Week 1’s job is to make that claim testable rather than just plausible: if judged duration only ever tracked clock duration, there would be nothing here to explain, and no reason to keep a log at all. The gap you’ll start noticing this week — between what the clock says and what you report — is the thing the rest of the semester explains, analyses, and eventually tests. Weeks 2 to 4 name specific mechanisms — what you’re doing while you wait, what you expected going in, what you’re told while it’s happening — that move judged duration independently of clock duration. Each week comes back to the same log you start this week, and asks it a different question.
What you’re building#
Starting this week, you keep a wait-observation log: a running personal record of ordinary waits, each one noting the clock duration alongside your judged duration, and whether that judgement was prospective or retrospective. The session for this week sets up the format and has you make your first entries. Nothing about the log requires special equipment or access — it runs on waits you’d be having anyway.
By Week 4 you’ll have several weeks of your own entries and three explanatory mechanisms to read them against. This week only asks you to start collecting, and to notice the first thing this distinction reveals: whether you knew in advance you’d be asked to judge a wait changes what “how long did that feel” even means as an answer.
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor