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.
Imagine two queues at the same passport office, same posted average wait, same kind of morning. One has a screen: “You are number 14. Now serving number 9.” The other has a numbered ticket and nothing else — no screen, no update, no one telling you anything until your number is finally called. Nobody in either queue was told a different story about how long this would take before they joined it. The difference is entirely in what happens after they’re already standing there.
This week’s claim, plainly#
Information received during a wait can affect how the wait is evaluated, without necessarily producing a corresponding change in judged duration. That’s the whole claim. It doesn’t say information makes a wait feel shorter, and it doesn’t say it always makes a wait feel better — only that evaluation and judged duration are two different things a wait produces, and information is a mechanism that can move one without moving the other.
Redrawing Week 3’s line#
Week 3 was careful about this and it stays true here: expectation is what you bring into a wait — set before it began. Information is what you receive while the wait is already underway — a countdown, a queue position, an announcement, someone saying “about five more minutes.” Your log has kept these apart since Week 1: “Expected wait” is written once, before the clock starts; “Available information” can change, or arrive, at any point after. A wait can have a confident expectation and zero information (you knew it would be ten minutes and heard nothing further), or no expectation at all and a screen counting down the second you sit down. This week stays entirely on the information side of that line.
What Hui and Tse actually did#
Hui and Tse studied what happens when people are given information about a wait once it has started, rather than left without it (Hui & Tse, 1996). Their measures included how acceptable the wait felt, the affective response to it, evaluation of the service afterwards, and a measure of perceived waiting duration specific to their study’s design. Read that last one carefully: their perceived-waiting-duration measure is not the same instrument as this course’s “Judged duration” field. Theirs was collected under a controlled experimental setup with a specific scenario and manipulation; yours is a personal, free-form estimate written in your own words. A finding about their measure is not automatically a finding about yours, and this week doesn’t assume it is.
What their study licenses is narrower and more useful: information delivered during a wait can shift acceptability, affect, and evaluation of the service. It does not show that information makes a wait feel shorter — that’s a specific, further claim about duration judgement that would need its own evidence, not a paraphrase of what Hui and Tse actually measured.
Why this isn’t a repeat of Week 3#
Week 3 introduced Pruyn and Smidts’ acceptable waiting time: a tolerance threshold, separate from what you’d predicted, against which a wait gets evaluated. Crossing that threshold, in their data, provoked a disproportionately strong negative reaction. That’s a finding about a reference standard you carry into a wait — a tolerance rather than a prediction, but still something already fixed before the wait starts. Information is a different kind of mechanism entirely: it isn’t a standard you bring with you, it’s something a system hands you only after the wait is already underway. Week 4 doesn’t extend Week 3’s reference-standard story onto a new source — it introduces a second, independent lever, one that only exists once the wait has already begun.
What this doesn’t establish#
This doesn’t establish that any information helps, that more information is always better information, or what happens when the information turns out to be wrong — a countdown that stalls, a queue position that stops moving. Hui and Tse’s study doesn’t speak to inaccurate information at all; that’s a real question this week’s source simply doesn’t answer, not one you should assume an answer to either way.
Why this matters#
This closes the block Weeks 1 to 4 have been building: Week 1 measured a wait, Weeks 2 to 4 each took the same log and asked what explains a difference between two entries — attention, then expectation, then information. Waiting Field Notes, worth 15% of the course and due at the end of this week, asks you to submit that log along with your own interpretation of what it shows across all three lenses at once, not just whichever one a given entry happens to fit best. From Week 5, the course stops reading your personal log and starts examining how waits get built — starting with the most literal piece of information design there is, the progress bar.
What you’re doing this week#
The session sends you back to the log a third time, this time sorting entries by what “Available information” actually contained, and asking whether entries that are similar in clock duration and in judged duration still land differently in Outcome/notes depending on whether information was available — which is the specific comparison this week’s claim is built on.
Teaching team
- Marisol Quaye — convenor