Concept · Cognitive Bias: Economic and consumer biases
Duration neglect
Origin: Fredrickson & Kahneman, 1993
Biological Parallel
Migratory birds encode journey quality by intensity of challenges (peak storm severity, predator encounters) rather than trip duration. A 3-day migration with severe storms is remembered as worse than a 10-day migration with mild weather, despite triple the flight time. Duration-insensitive memory makes sense when event quality matters more than temporal length. Duration neglect mirrors this: we remember colonoscopy pain by peak and end, not duration, because ancestral threats were evaluated by intensity (how bad was the injury?) not temporal length.