Duration neglect is the

psychological Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between t ...

observation that people's judgments of the unpleasantness of painful experiences depend very little on the duration of those experiences. Multiple experiments have found that these judgments tend to be affected by two factors: the ''peak'' (when the experience was the most painful) and how quickly the pain diminishes. If it diminishes more slowly, the experience is judged to be less painful. Hence, the term "

peak–end rule The peak–end rule is a psychological heuristic in which people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e., its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the exp ...

" describes this process of evaluation. Duration neglect is a specific form of the more general

extension neglect __NOTOC__ Extension neglect is a type of cognitive bias which occurs when the sample size is ignored when its determination is relevant. For instance, when reading an article about a scientific study, extension neglect occurs when the reader igno ...

Boundaries

Duration neglect appears to be limited to unfamiliar experiences. When research participants evaluate experiences with which they are or made familiar, such as a telephone ringing or their regular commute, they appear to be sensitive to the duration of experiences. Similarly, providing participants with a modulus (i.e., a standard of comparison) by which to evaluate the duration of events, also makes them sensitive to duration.

Examples

In one study,

Daniel Kahneman Daniel Kahneman (; he, דניאל כהנמן; born March 5, 1934) is an Israeli-American psychologist and economist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was award ...

and

Barbara Fredrickson Barbara Lee Fredrickson (born June 15, 1964) is an American professor in the department of psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she is the Kenan Distinguished Professor of Psychology. She is also the Principal Inves ...

showed subjects pleasant or aversive film clips. When reviewing the clips mentally at a later time, subjects did not appear to take the length of the stimuli into account, instead judging them as if they were only a series of affective "snapshots". In another demonstration, Kahneman and Fredrickson with other collaborators had subjects place their hands in painfully cold water. Under one set of instructions, they had to keep their hand in the water for an additional 30 seconds as the water was slowly heated to a warmer but still uncomfortably cold level, and under another set of instructions they were to remove their hand immediately. Otherwise, both experiences were the same. Most subjects chose to repeat the longer experience. Subjects apparently judged the experience according to the peak–end rule (in other words, according to its worst and final moments only), paying little attention to duration. Duration neglect can be observed in medicine, as it may lead patients to be inaccurate when judging whether their symptoms are improving with treatment.

Debiasing

Some forms of duration neglect may be reduced or eliminated by having participants answer in graphical format, or give a rating for every five minutes. Duration neglect is a subtype of

and a component of

affective forecasting Affective forecasting (also known as hedonic forecasting, or the hedonic forecasting mechanism) is the prediction of one's affect (emotional state) in the future. As a process that influences preferences, decisions, and behavior, affective fore ...

References

{{reflist, 30em Cognitive biases

Boundaries

Examples

Debiasing

See also

References