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.
The bus was six minutes late. Is that a six-minute wait, or a wait that came in six minutes worse than you’d already decided it would be? Two people standing at the same stop, both delayed by the same six minutes on the same clock, can walk away with different accounts of it — one mildly annoyed, one genuinely put out — if one of them expected the bus on time and the other expected it to run a few minutes late anyway. Nothing about the clock changed between them.
A field you’ve had since Week 1#
Every entry in your log already has an “Expected wait” — what you thought the wait would be, before it started, if you had any expectation at all. Up to now that field has mostly sat there unused; Weeks 1 and 2 asked what the clock said and what occupied you, not what you’d predicted going in. This week reads that field against the other two: Clock duration and Judged duration.
Expectation is not information#
Keep these apart, because Week 4 depends on the difference. Expectation is what you believed about a wait before it began — built from habit, from what a similar wait has been like before, from whatever you happened to assume. Information is what a system tells or shows you while the wait is happening — a countdown, a queue position, an announcement. Your log already separates them: “Expected wait” is set once, before the clock starts; “Available information” can change over the course of the wait itself. This week stays on the expectation side. What a system does with information during a wait is next week’s question, not this one.
Two different reference points#
Your log’s “Expected wait” answers one question: how long did I think this would take? Pruyn and Smidts studied a related but distinct reference point they call acceptable waiting time: how long was I prepared to tolerate, in this particular situation (Pruyn & Smidts, 1998)? A prediction and a tolerance threshold usually move together, but they don’t have to:
- Expected 5 minutes, acceptable 15 minutes, actual 8 minutes — the wait ran longer than expected, but comfortably inside what would have been tolerated.
- Expected 15 minutes, acceptable 10 minutes, actual 12 minutes — the wait finished sooner than expected, yet still exceeded the acceptable threshold.
Pruyn and Smidts didn’t measure anything called “Expected wait”; their acceptable waiting time is a tolerance standard, not a duration prediction. Their finding is closely related evidence about the same kind of reference-point effect your log’s expectation field is built to catch, not a direct study of that exact field — worth reading carefully rather than treating as interchangeable.
What their reference point predicts#
Crossing the acceptable-waiting-time threshold, in their data, provokes a disproportionately strong negative affective response — going past what you were prepared to tolerate lands harder than the raw extra minutes would suggest on their own. In their service-waiting study, objective waiting time affected satisfaction mainly indirectly, through perceived waiting time; the waiting environment affected satisfaction too, but through a separate, affective route rather than by changing perceived time itself. Perceived time is one channel objective duration works through, not the only thing satisfaction depends on.
This is a finding about appraisal — how a wait gets evaluated, which is what your log’s Outcome/notes field is for — not a finding about judged duration, the separate estimate-of-length field Week 1 defined. Pruyn and Smidts don’t show that missing a reference point makes you estimate the wait as numerically longer; they show it makes you feel worse about a wait of whatever length you estimated. Whether a gap against expectation (or against what you’d tolerate) also shifts the judged-duration number itself is a further question your log may or may not be able to speak to — worth checking, not worth assuming.
Where information fits, briefly#
Hui and Tse ran an experiment on a different piece of the puzzle: giving people information during a wait — how long it would be, or where they stood in a queue — and tracking effects on how acceptable the wait felt, on affective response, and on evaluation of the service afterwards (Hui & Tse, 1996). Their study wasn’t designed to test expectation against information as two separate constructs — that split is this course’s own framing, drawn from the plain fact that the two answer different questions (what you believed beforehand, against what you were told once the wait was already underway). What Hui and Tse’s finding does usefully show is that information given during a wait works through acceptability and affect — the same territory Pruyn and Smidts’ acceptable-waiting-time threshold occupies. That overlap, not a shared study, is the thread Week 4 picks up.
What this doesn’t establish#
None of this licenses “knowing the wait will be five minutes makes it feel like five minutes,” and it doesn’t license “a wait that beats your expectation always feels short.” Exceeding what you were prepared to tolerate provokes a stronger reaction than the raw gap in minutes would predict — that’s Pruyn and Smidts’ specific, narrower claim about the acceptable-waiting-time threshold, not a general law about expectation softening or sharpening every wait, and not something to assume just because a wait finished under or over what you’d predicted rather than what you’d have tolerated. It’s a pattern found across their study’s data, not something guaranteed to happen the same way for any one wait you happen to log this week.
Why this matters#
Time (Week 1) and attention (Week 2) are both about what happens during a wait. Expectation is different: it’s set before the wait even starts, and it changes what the same clock duration means once the wait is over, without requiring the clock duration itself to change at all. That’s a second, independent way the thesis holds — waiting is an experience, not merely a duration — and it’s why a log with only clock durations in it could never have shown you this on its own.
What you’re doing this week#
The session goes back to the “Expected wait” field for entries you already have, sorts them by whether the wait ran shorter than expected, about as expected, or longer, and asks whether that classification lines up with anything in your Outcome/notes. One log, checked against expectation, still can’t prove that expectation caused anything — it can only show whether the pattern researchers report shows up anywhere in what you’ve already written down.
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor