I want to show you a graph from a paper that I absolutely love. It’s not a graph of the results but a graph of the idea. It is the curvilinear graph that can be found in this paper:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/288763459_Pace_yourself_Improving_time-saving_judgments_when_increasing_activity_speed
So, you see two things here. The first thing you notice is a scale in miles per hour: 0, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, and so on. We’re all familiar with these scales. But this one has another scale—minutes per 10 miles. How many minutes does it take to cover 10 miles? For instance, when you drive at 100 mph, it takes 6 minutes. At 40 mph, it takes 15 minutes. At 10 mph, it takes 60 minutes.
Now, the interesting part is that we often think about speed in linear terms. We say things like, “I’m driving 20 instead of 10” or “I’m driving 90 instead of 80.” There’s a temptation to believe that driving faster will get us there much quicker. This is true to an extent but not as linear as we might think.
This graph shows that if you drive at 10 mph, it takes you 60 minutes to cover 10 miles. At 20 mph, it’s half the time. At 30 mph, it’s a third—so from 60 minutes down to 20 minutes. If you go up to 60 mph, it’s just 10 minutes.
In the beginning of the graph, increasing speed makes a significant difference. Driving at 20 instead of 10 halves your travel time. But between speeds like 50 and 60 mph, the difference drops from 12 minutes to just 10 minutes for those same ten miles.
When I was driving from New York back to North Carolina—a long trip—I was tempted to drive faster to save time. However, this graph made me realize that while speeding up from very low speeds makes a big difference, increasing speed when you’re already going fast doesn’t save much time and adds risk.
Imagine if our dashboards showed us minutes per ten miles instead of miles per hour. We’d likely realize that the difference between driving at 60 and at 70 isn’t substantial enough to justify the risk. If we only had the scale of minutes per ten miles, we’d probably drive slower overall.
The point this paper emphasizes, and what I want to highlight, is that our perception of reality is mediated by how information is presented to us. When instruments display data in one way (like miles per hour), we think about it differently than if they displayed it another way (like minutes per ten miles).
We should consider how different mediations affect our decision-making and identify which ones are incompatible with good decisions and which ones need adjustment.
There’s lots of work to be done on this front—not just with speed but in many other areas as well.
