If Time Flew, You Had Fun
A study in the journal Psychological Science finds that if people believe that time has flown, they think they had more fun. Karen Hopkin reports

As we all know, time flies when you’re having fun. But according to a study in the journal Psychological Science, the reverse is just as true: we enjoy ourselves more when we think time passes quickly.

Time is a tough thing to keep track of. Sometimes it zooms, other times it drags. And psychologists got to wondering, as psychologists often do: how does that make you feel?

So they asked people to take a 10-minute test. And then they pulled a fast one: For half the volunteers, they called “time’s up” when only five minutes had passed. The other half had to labor for 20 minutes before their 10-minute test was done. The result? Compared with the folks for whom time stood still, the finished-in-five team said they had more fun.

—Karen Hopkin