We all know that time flies when you’re having fun. In a previous blog entry, I pointed out that when
you are involved in something engaging the time seems to rocket by, even though
that same event may feel long when you look back on it. The flip side, of course, is that boring
events seem to drag on. A one-hour
lecture history lecture can seem longer than the entire era being described.
An interesting paper in the October, 2011 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
by Edward O’Brien, Phyllis Anastasio and Brad Bushman explores the role of your
sense of entitlement on the perception of the passage of time.
The basic idea is straightforward. At any given time, everyone feels some sense
of entitlement. Standing on the line to
check out at a big box retailer, you might feel particularly entitled to better
service. So, a 10-minute wait for a slow
cashier may feel like an hour. On the
other hand, if you were sitting in a waiting room at the White House with
before having a chance to meet the President, you might consider yourself lucky
to be there. In that case, a 10-minute
wait might not feel so long.
In one study, the authors just looked at the correlation
between people’s general sense of entitlement and their perception of
time. It turns out that there is a
difference between people in how entitled they feel in general. Some people generally feel more like they
deserve to get things from the world than other people.
The authors gave people a number of questionnaires including
one that measured the sense of entitlement.
Then they had people do either a boring task (copying a matrix of
letters) or a less boring task (using that same matrix of letters to find
people’s names). People did this task
for exactly 10 minutes, and then they were asked how long the task took. (To make the time judgment harder, there were
no clocks in the room, and people had been asked to remove their watches before
starting the study.)
When people did the relatively fun task, there was no relationship between the amount of time
people felt they spent doing the task and their general sense of
entitlement. In contrast, when people
did the boring task, the more people
generally feel entitled, the longer they felt they spent on the task.
Two other studies actually manipulated people’s sense of
entitlement. For example, in one study,
college students did a long (and rather boring) questionnaire in which they
answered mundane questions about themselves (like how often do you eat fast
food?). To influence the sense of
entitlement, one group was told that they were answering the questions, because
the university wanted to know more about each individual student. A second group was told that the university
wanted to know more about the student body in general. After doing the questionnaire, participants
judged how long it took to complete and also rated how much they thought the
survey was a waste of their time.
Now, you might think that being asked questions about
yourself would be more interesting than answering questions about students in
general. So, it could easily be the case
that the survey would seem shorter when you are more engaged in the task. In fact, people felt the survey took more
time when they were told it was about them in particular than when it was about
students in general. So, the sense of
entitlement increased people’s judgments of the time the survey took to
complete. Other analyses of the data
show that this difference reflected that people who thought the survey was
about them in particular felt the task was a bigger waste of their time than
those who thought it was about students in general.
What does all this mean?
Time is one of our most precious resources. The greater your sense of entitlement, the more
that you want to avoid wasting resources.
As a result, the more entitled you feel, the more pain you experience
when your time is wasted. Even though
nobody enjoys frustration, this mechanism is a good one to have. If we did not experience frustration when our
time was being wasted, we might persist doing things that do not deserve our
effort.
