Why do some things “seem like they just happened yesterday?”

The 

Telescoping Effect

, explained.
Bias

What is Telescoping Effect?

The telescoping effect refers to inaccurate perceptions regarding time, where people see recent events as more remote than they are (backward telescoping), and remote events as more recent (forward telescoping). This mental error in memory can occur whenever we make temporal assumptions regarding past events.

Where it occurs

It seems every year, on September 11, people remark how 9/11 seems like it wasn’t that long ago, and are surprised to hear the media highlight the number of years that have actually passed since the tragedy. Conversely, a few months into the COVID-19 pandemic and one might feel a lot more time has passed than it has. Instances of forward telescoping however, such as the case with 9/11, are more common than backward telescoping.1

These misjudgments in time stem from our tendency to assess remembered events by how long ago it feels they occurred rather than a deliberate calculation. Although it’s easier to spot these memory mix-ups in other people, they’re not always easy to detect in ourselves.

Sources

  1. Lavrakas, P. J. (2008). Encyclopedia of survey research methods (Vols. 1-0). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, Inc. doi: 10.4135/9781412963947
  2. Morwitz, V. G. (1997). It seems like only yesterday: The nature and consequences of telescoping errors in marketing research. Journal of Consumer Psychology, 6(1), 1-29.
  3. Brown, N. R., Rips, L. J., & Shevell, S. K. (1985). The subjective dates of natural events in very-long-term memory. Cognitive psychology, 17(2), 139-177.
  4. Rubin, D. C., & Baddeley, A. D. (1989). Telescoping is not time compression: A model. Memory & Cognition, 17(6), 653-661.
  5. Neter, J., & Waksberg, J. (1964). A study of response errors in expenditures data from household interviews. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 59(305), 18-55.
  6. Shillington, A. M., Woodruff, S. I., Clapp, J. D., Reed, M. B., & Lemus, H. (2012). Self-reported age of onset and telescoping for cigarettes, alcohol, and marijuana: Across eight years of the national longitudinal survey of youth. Journal of child & adolescent substance abuse, 21(4), 333-348.

About the Authors

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Dan Pilat

Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.

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Dr. Sekoul Krastev

Sekoul is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. A decision scientist with a PhD in Decision Neuroscience from McGill University, Sekoul's work has been featured in peer-reviewed journals and has been presented at conferences around the world. Sekoul previously advised management on innovation and engagement strategy at The Boston Consulting Group as well as on online media strategy at Google. He has a deep interest in the applications of behavioral science to new technology and has published on these topics in places such as the Huffington Post and Strategy & Business.

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