Why do we assume faster is better?
From an article by Behavioral Scientist
We sometimes allow the urgent to drown out the important. The short-term consideration drowns out the long-term consideration. But in the process, we may also be ruining it for everybody else.
Let's think of a speedometer. It shows how extraordinarily subjective our perception of time is. Assuming you’re going 10 miles at 10 miles an hour, it’ll take you an hour. If you’re going 10 miles, there’s a big time-saving by going at 20 miles an hour rather than 10 miles an hour. In fact, you’ll save a whole 30 minutes just by accelerating about 10 miles an hour.
On the other hand, if you accelerate from 80 miles an hour to 90 for example, you basically save 50 secs.
So if you’re driving on the motorway at 60 and you realize you’re going to be five minutes late for an appointment and you put you foot down, after driving at an insanely fast and dangerous speed for about eight minutes, you suddenly realize your arrival time has only improved by one minute.
What this effectively says is: going quite a bit faster when you’re going slowly is a really big gain. Going very fast when you’re already going fast is an unwise action. Basically, once you hit a comfortable 65-70 on the road, don’t bother. That’s enough. It’s a waste of time because the risk you encounter - the risk you incur on yourself, the risk you effectively impose on other people by going any faster - it's utterly pointless in terms of time saved.
What happens when you give a load of engineers a brief? I always ask the question: "What would’ve happened if you hadn’t given the brief for High Speed 2 to a load of engineering firms who immediately focused on speed, time, distance, capacity? What if you’d given the brief to Disney instead?"
They would’ve said, “First of all, we’re going to rewrite the question. The right question for High Speed 2 is: How do we make the train journey between London and Manchester so enjoyable that people feel stupid going by car?” That’s the right question. It’s not about time and speed and distance. Those things only obliquely correlate with human behaviour, with human preference.
Why does that question never get asked? Because it’s an open-ended question. Open-ended question have many possible right answers. But business people, politicians, decision makers want a right answer. They pretend this is a high school math problem with a single right answer, you solve for the right answer using high school math, and then nobody can argue with you because apparently you haven’t made a decision. You’ve simply followed the data.
This is a massive problem in decision-making. We try to close down the solution space of any problem in order to arrive at a single right answer that is difficult to argue with.
There are brilliant examples all over the place of people tweaking time subjectively. One of my favourites is the Uber map. It doesn’t change how long you wait for the taxi. It changes the quality of the waiting time by reducing uncertainty. If you look at human emotions, although humans might say, “I don’t like waiting for a taxi,” what makes them uneasy is the uncertainty of the arrival. It’s not actually the duration. Too often, we optimize for the numerical thing, time and speed. We’re not optimizing for the emotional state, which is disquiet or anxiety.
With advertising, you can rebrand time: “Good things come to those who wait.” What was the one downside of Guinness? Bartenders hated it because it took ages to pour. But with advertising, you take a weakness, turn it into a strength.
One of the worst mistakes we ever made was making email instantaneous. We should have built in a two-hour buffer unless you flagged the email as time-sensitive or urgent. Why is that? Because now everybody has to check their email every 10 or 15 minutes on the off chance that someone has sent them a time-sensitive email. So the burden falls on the recipient (which means everybody) rather than the sender (which means one person) to sift the urgent messages from the important but not time-sensitive.
It has been a productivity disaster. A fundamental catastrophe. In fact, one of the greatest ways you can improve your productivity is by setting your server to only check for new emails every two to three hours.
There’s an extraordinary case of this bias toward time-saving, that faster must be better. Someone I know who is an expert at Transport for London found out that quite a lot of people, quite a lot of the time, actually enjoy commuting. They enjoy the commute home much more than the commute to work. Men enjoy it a bit more than women. Economists have noticed that people live a bit further from work than they optimally should in order to create a chronological buffer between where they work and where they live. We like that decompression time.
All TfL models that justify transport investment assume that travel time is always a disutility. In other words, the more time you spend in transit, the worse off you are. So this is what’s happened to the world: optimization trumps human preference. The people who want to win the argument are effectively prepared to ignore human truths to preserve the integrity of the artificial model.
A problem which bedevils many technologies and many behaviours is that it starts as an option, then it becomes an obligation. We welcome the technology at first because it presents us with a choice. But then everybody else has to adopt the technology. Parking apps are one example. It’s not just that parking apps were bad necessarily, it’s because they went from being an option to being an obligation, to a point where there are no parking payment machines and they are installed in basement car parks where you have no chance of a mobile signal. And when behaviours become universal, they affect everybody.
I often say that the opposite of a good idea can be another good idea. You can turn the slow pour of a Guinness into a virtue. You can take a long train journey and you can turn it into a benefit. Go on that train and pack a hamper - it’s a day out rather than a tedious journey. People on a Saturday love nothing better than to shop in the most inefficient way possible. That’s basically what a farmer’s market is - let’s take a Tesco and reverse everything. You’ve got to go to seven different places to buy anything. You’ve got to have a chat with everybody you buy something from.
There are things in life that you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient. And there are things where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest. And I don’t think we’re going to differentiate between those things because the automatic assumption is going to be that faster is better. We need to understand when we need to go slow.
Read the full article with more examples here.
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From an article by Behavioral Scientist, 04/12/2024