Pace yourself: Improving time-saving judgments when increasing activity speed

Abstract

The time-saving bias describes people’s tendency to misestimate the time they can save by increasing the speed in which they perform an activity such as driving or completing a task. People typically underestimate time saved when increasing from a low speed and overestimate time saved when increasing from an already high speed. We suggest that this bias is the result of people’s failure to recognize the curvilinear relationship between increasing speed and reducing activity time: As initial speed rises, the same speed increases will yield smaller reductions in time. We explore a new technique to de-bias these faulty estimations: converting measurements of speed to a pace measure (e.g., minutes per fixed distance). Utilizing common driving scenarios, we show that participants who received pace data made more accurate estimations of journey duration at various speeds, time-savings at various speed increases and the required speed to complete a journey.

Keywords

• time-saving bias
• time judgments
• speed judgments
• pace
• de-biasing