Telescoping Effect
We misplace events in time: recent events feel older and distant events feel more recent.
The telescoping effect (or telescoping bias) refers to the temporal displacement of events: people tend to perceive recent events as having occurred in the more distant past (backward telescoping) and distant events as having occurred more recently than they actually did (forward telescoping). This distorts memory-based surveys about health behaviors, purchasing, and crime victimization.
What it looks like in the wild.
- Everyday life Memory Misplacement When asked 'how long ago did you last visit the doctor?' people systematically report longer intervals than their medical records show, believing the recent visit was further back in time.
Recognising a definition is not the same skill as spotting it.
Two scenarios from the app, with distractors drawn from the same family of biases — which is what makes them hard.
Someone says, 'I've been meaning to fix that leak for months,' but their partner reminds them it only started yesterday, while they think a repair they did last year was done very recently.
Ryan thinks he last saw that movie 'recently,' but it was actually over two years ago.
Biases rarely arrive alone.
Understand more. Assume less.
188 biases, 18,869 scenarios, and a record of how you actually decide.
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