Duration Neglect

The charge

Duration neglect is the tendency to pay too little attention to how long an experience lasted when later evaluating it. People often remember the highlights and ending more than the total time spent.

How it operates

Retrospective evaluation compresses an experience into salient moments rather than integrating every minute. Because duration is cognitively costly to reconstruct, it gets underweighted relative to peaks and endings.

Logged incidents

1. Incident 01

   A customer rates a long but mostly smooth onboarding flow similarly to a shorter one because both ended well.

2. Incident 02

   An employee remembers a six-month stressful project as acceptable because the final demo was exciting.

3. Incident 03

   A candidate accepts a role after a pleasant final interview, underweighting months of confusing and slow recruiting.

What to watch for

When evaluating an experience, check whether you are ignoring time cost. Ask: "Would I judge this the same way if it had lasted twice as long?"