Distortion in time perception as a result of concern about appearing biased

Intergroup time bias and aversive racism in the medical context

Time is fundamental to organizing all aspects of human life. When invested in relationships, it has a psychological meaning as it indicates how much individuals value others and their interest in maintaining social relationships. Previous research has identified an intergroup time bias (ITB) in racialized social relations, defined as a discriminatory behavior in which White individuals invest more time in evaluating White than Black individuals. This research proposes an aversive racism explanation for the ITB effect and examines its consequences in the medical context. In four experimental studies (N = 434), we found that White medical trainees invested more time in forming impressions of White (vs. Black) male patients. Study 5 (N = 193) further revealed more time investment in diagnosing, assessing pain, and prescribing opioids for White than Black male patients. This biased time effect mediated the impact of patients' skin color on health care outcomes, leading to greater diagnostic accuracy and pain perception, and lower opioid prescriptions. A meta-analytical integration of the results (Study 6) confirmed the ITB effect reliability across experiments and that it is stronger in participants with an aversive racist profile (vs. consistently prejudiced or nonprejudiced). These findings provide the first evidence that bias in time investment favoring White (vs. Black) patients is associated with aversive racism and impacts medical health care outcomes. Furthermore, these results offer insights into the sociopsychological meaning of time investment in health care and provide a theoretical explanation for an understudied insidious form of discrimination that is critical to comprehending the persistency of racial health care disparities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Factors influencing passage of time judgment in individuals' daily lives: evidence from the experience sampling and diary methods

People often express feeling that time passes quickly or slowly in their daily lives, which is termed passage of time judgment (PoTJ). Past studies have shown that PoTJ is affected by emotional valence and arousal; however, few studies have verified the effects of alertness, attention to time, and time expectation on PoTJ and whether the effects are stable over different time periods. Using the experience sampling method (ESM) and diary method, the present study collected data from 105 participants and examined for the first time whether alertness, attention to time, and time expectation affect PoTJ based on daily life data, as well as whether above factors, emotional valence, and arousal are stable over different time periods. All participants answered a questionnaire five times a day on their in-the-day PoTJ and related factors regarding the last 30 min, and answered the same questionnaire once a day at 23:00 regarding the of-the-day PoTJ. The results showed that alertness and time expectation, as well as emotional valence and arousal, predicted an individual's in-the-day PoTJ over a shorter period (i.e., the last 30 min); in contrast, only time expectation and emotional arousal predicted of-the-day PoTJ over a longer period (i.e., the past day). These results suggest that, alertness and time expectation are important factors influencing PoTJ, in addition to emotional state. Of-the-day PoTJ correlates most strongly with the mean and latest in-the-day PoTJ, implying that overall perception of time passage is influenced by both cumulative temporal experience and recent temporal experience.

Politically Biased Time Perception and Perspective

The main objective of this study was to determine if the estimation of time could be used to reveal an implicit political bias. The study also aimed at determining if a political bias is related to a specific temporal perspective or to other personality factors. The main demonstration is based on a bisection temporal task where the participants were asked to say if the duration of the presentation of a politician’s photo is short or long. There were three independent variables of interest: the location of politicians on the left (liberal) or right (conservative) on the political axis, the emotions expressed on a politician’s photo (joy, anger or neutral), and the political allegiances of the participants. Overall, compared to conditions with neutral faces or faces expressing joy, participants overestimated the duration of faces expressing anger. This effect, however, depends on the political allegiance of the participants. Compared to the neutral face condition, liberal participants overestimated the length of presentation of politicians’ faces in the joy and anger conditions. The results also showed that, compared to the condition in which photos of conservative politicians are presented, conservative participants underestimated the presentation duration of liberal politicians’ photos; such an influence of the orientation of presented politicians was not observed with liberal participants. The results also reveal that conservative participants differed from liberal participants on the future-oriented scale and on the past-positive-oriented scale of the Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (ZTPI). The study shows that time perception can be used to reveal a kind of implicit political bias.