Impatience in Timing Decisions: Effects and Moderation: Supplementary Material

<p>Decisions on <i>when to act</i> 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, <i>impatience</i> is investigated as a bias affecting timing decisions, and is successfully manipulated and moderated. Experiment 1 (<i>N</i> = 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 (<i>N</i> = 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 (<i>N</i> = 304) shows that the mechanism behind this impatience moderation is altered time perception and presents trade-offs between duration perception and duration recall.</p>