Title
You’re Having Fun When Time Flies: The Hedonic Consequences of Subjective Time Progression
Department/School
Marketing
Date of this version
2010
Document Type
Article
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797609354832
Abstract
Seven studies tested the hypothesis that people use subjective time progression in hedonic evaluation. When people believe that time has passed unexpectedly quickly, they rate tasks as more engaging, noises as less irritating, and songs as more enjoyable. We propose that felt time distortion operates as a metacognitive cue that people implicitly attribute to their enjoyment of an experience (i.e., time flew, so the experience must have been fun). Consistent with this attribution account, the effects of felt time distortion on enjoyment ratings were moderated by the need for attribution, the strength of the “time flies” naive theory, and the presence of an alternative attribution. These findings suggest a previously unexplored process through which subjective time progression can influence the hedonic evaluation of experiences.
Volume
21
Issue
1
Published in
Psychological Science
Citation/Other Information
Sackett, A. M., Meyvis, T., Nelson, L. D., Converse, B. A., & Sackett, A. L. (2010). You’re Having Fun When Time Flies: The Hedonic Consequences of Subjective Time Progression. Psychological Science, 21(1), 111–117. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797609354832