Days-of-the-Week Effect in Temporal Judgments

Abstract

Consumers often receive and evaluate temporal information, such as the number of days it will take a package to arrive or the number of days a vacation will last. Across eight preregistered studies (N ¼ 4,758), we examine how using days-of-the-week information in descriptions of temporal intervals (e.g., “ordered on Monday, February 1, delivered on Saturday, February 6” vs. “ordered on February 1, delivered on February 6”) affects consumers’ duration perceptions. We propose that the days-of-the-week framing prompts people to rely on narrow-span implicit scales characterized by lower thresholds for magnitude categories. These implicit scales lead people to judge objectively equivalent temporal intervals to be longer, which in turn has downstream consequences for consumers’ time-versus-money tradeoffs, work planning, and provider-switching decisions. This research adds to our understanding of how decision context can activate different implicit scales and how these scales shape consumer judgments.