Laypeople’s Beliefs Affect their Reports about the Subjective Experience of Time

Abstract

Because the general population may be familiar with the phenomenon that life appears to speed up as people become older, participants’ preconceptions may affect how they answer questionnaires about the subjective experience of time. To be able to account for these preconceptions in future research, we assessed laypeople’s beliefs about the phenomenon. Participants (N = 313) were asked whether they were familiar with the phenomenon, whether they experienced the phenomenon themselves, and what they thought that the cause or causes of the phenomenon might be. More than 80% of the participants had read or heard about the phenomenon prior to the study, suggesting that the phenomenon is well known among the general population. Furthermore, although most participants experienced the phenomenon themselves, familiarity with the phenomenon affected whether they felt that life appeared to be speeding up and whether time passed fast for them. Familiarity also affected whether participants attributed the phenomenon to changes in objective or subjective time but not the endorsement of the phenomenon’s causes. Finally, participants also had preconceptions about what time periods represent ‘the present’ and ‘the past’. Whereas nearly all participants considered the past to have lasted more than one year, two-third of the participants felt that the present represented a period less than one year.