Impatience in Timing Decisions: Effects and Moderation

Abstract

Decisions on when to act are critical in many health care, safety and security situations, where acting too early or too late can both lead to huge costs or losses. In this paper, impatience is investigated as a bias affecting timing decisions, and is successfully manipulated and moderated. Experiment 1 (N = 123) shows that in different tasks with the same duration, participants perform better when acting early is advantageous, as compared to when acting late is. Experiment 2 (N = 701) manipulates impatience and shows that impatience induced by delays (a) affects timing decisions in the subsequent tasks, (b) increases a tendency to receive information faster, only for a few seconds, with cost and no gain, and (c) reduces satisfaction in the subsequent task. Furthermore, impatience is significantly moderated by showing fast countdowns during the delays. Experiment 3 (N = 304) shows that the mechanism behind this impatience moderation is altered time perception and presents trade-offs between duration perception and duration recall.

The Positive Impact of Task Familiarity, Risk Propensity, and Need For Cognition on Observed Timing Decisions in a Security Game

“…(In Study 1 of the present paper, we describe and analyze these data.) In other work, we determine the rational strategies and begin to develop a model backed by a cognitive architecture, which describes human heuristics that practically implement risk-taking preference in timing decisions [2,3,27].…”

“…Some of the most difficult judgment calls humans have to make concern not just how to act but when to do so. These judgment calls are not always predetermined by policies but are made in near-real time by decision-makers who are helped and hindered by individually varying preferences and systematic cognitive biases (e.g., [1,2]). In this paper, we present two exploratory studies that show how an individual's personality characteristics of risk propensity and need for cognition influence behavior over increasing task experience in a game that models safety and security decisions.…”

“…Early checks, before the event, come with a moderate, constant cost, while late checks, after the event, result in a benefit that declines linearly with temporal distance to the event. The game has a defined rational norm [6], which defines temporal checkpoints that maximize expected utility (see [2] for the rational model). This allows us to examine timing decisions in relation to this normative model.…”

“…Economic-behavioral models of such decision-making ascribe a hyperbolic discount function that translates rewards and temporal delays to a perceived value (e.g., [13]). Indeed, FlipIt players can exhibit a preference for earlier action [2]. However, we want to make it clear that in the experiments presented here, we keep the wait for the reward constant and decouple reward from action timing.…”

“…This shortened scale has been tested and verified to be usable as an alternative for the original long scale [10]. 2 NFC is a measure of "relative proclivity to process information" and "tendency to. .…”