We've all been in this situation: when you’re sitting in a boring meeting, standing in line, or waiting for the bus to leave, it’s starting to feel like time moves much slower than usual. Nevertheless, the most enjoyable moments seem to pass with lightning speed. Obviously, boring events take longer than the ones that stimulate us. But there is another reason why we sometimes experience time differently.
Time binding
If we understand what caused the event, or we create it ourselves, the time between its cause and consequences seems to be shorter than in the case when we have no control over what is happening. This phenomenon is known as timing, and it can help us uncover some important truths about the relationship between cause and effect, and whether we are actually responsible for different actions.
Temporary weaves work in a curious way. The cause of the event appears to be shifted further in time to its effect, which in turn is shifted back in time to action. From our point of view, these two events seem to be directed towards each other, and, in essence, connected with each other in time.
Patrick Haggart and his colleagues at UCL (University College London) were the first to study this phenomenon. They asked the volunteers to press a button that plays a sound after a short delay. The time between pressing a button and playing a sound seemed shorter for those people who were responsible for this action than for those who were bystanders.
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Intentional binding
But this effect did not occur if the sound was heard after the volunteers' muscles were involuntarily contracted (due to brain stimulation), or after they heard a lower sound with the same delay. Therefore, researchers call this phenomenon deliberate binding, since they believe that it was caused by the voluntary participation of a given person, which limited action and effect along with time. Therefore, this phenomenon was quickly embraced as a new way of assessing how people feel they are in control in certain situations.
Using Milgram's experiment
Recently, scientists have even been using a timeline on Milgram's famous electroshock experiment to test whether people feel responsible for the actions they were forced to take. In Milgram's original experiment, participants were instructed to apply electric shocks to each other to see if people would do things that would harm others.
Haggard used a similar setting, and he also asked participants to rate the time between the moment they pressed the button that turned on the electric current and the time it took effect. The researchers found that when a participant was forced to turn on an electric current, he felt the time between his action and the result was longer than when he acted voluntarily.
Connection with medicine and psychology
Based on this, the researchers concluded that when a person is forced to do something, he feels less of his control and responsibility for these actions than when it happens voluntarily. This has important implications for situations such as war crimes, in which defendants often claim that they only followed orders and therefore are not held accountable for their actions.
Timing has been used to study medical conditions, which has also had some interesting results. The researchers found that people with schizophrenia have more temporary bonding than healthy people. This suggests that patients experience an exaggerated sense of control over the results of their actions. This may help explain why they believe they are able to control things that they really cannot be held responsible for.
The reason is not in control
While timing was quickly adopted as a way to measure feelings of control and responsibility, researchers at Cardiff University showed that this effect is likely to be causal. They found that we experience this connection when we watch one event become the result of a second, even if we are not directly responsible for it. For example, when a mechanical lever presses a button, which then plays a sound.
In essence, this shows that our perception of time can shape our understanding of cause and effect. This connection is even more visible when a person is involved in the action, but most likely this is due to human activity.
How children perceive it
An interesting suggestion is that deliberate tying is a way for us to learn more about the world. Perhaps we perceive two events related to each other in order to more clearly understand how the world works and how our actions affect the environment. To test this theory, researchers at the University of Belfast and Cardiff are studying how children experience this phenomenon. Perhaps children experience the bonding effect more as a way of effectively learning and understanding a world about which they have less knowledge than adults.
On the other hand, children may experience less bondage than adults. This may be because they are less able to select and use information from the external environment. Alternatively, binding can be sustainable throughout our lives, and reflect an embedded and unchanging way of experiencing and knowing the world around us. Regardless of the results, this study can provide us with valuable insights into how we get to know the world.