In cognitive psychology, the telescoping effect (or telescoping bias) is a phenomenon in which people underestimate the recency of recent events (backward telescoping), and overestimate the recency of distant events (forward telescoping). The approximate time at which events switch from backward to forward telescoping is three years, with events occurring three years in the past being equally likely to be reported with forward telescoping bias as with backward telescoping bias. Although telescoping occurs in both the forward and backward directions, in general the effect is to increase the number of events reported too recently. This net effect in the forward direction is because forces that impair memory, such as lack of salience, also impair time perception. Telescoping leads to an over-reporting of the frequency of events. This over-reporting is because participants include events beyond the period, either events that are too recent for the target time period (backward telescoping) or events that are too old for the target time period (forward telescoping).
Origin of the term The original work on telescoping is usually attributed to a 1964 article by Neter and Joseph Waksberg in the Journal of the American Statistical Association. The term telescoping comes from the idea that time seems to shrink toward the present in the way that the distance to objects seems to shrink when they are viewed through a telescope.
Real-world example A real-world example of the telescoping effect is the case of Ferdi Elsas, an infamous kidnapper and murderer in the Netherlands. When he was let out of prison, most of the general population did not believe he had been in prison long enough. Due to forward telescoping, people thought Ferdi Elsas' sentence started more recently than it actually did. Telescoping has important real world applications, especially in survey research. Marketing firms often use surveys to ask when consumers last bought a product, and government agencies often use surveys to discover information about drug abuse or about victimology. Telescoping may bias answers to these questions.
Methods for studying Telescoping is studied in psychology by asking participants to recall dates or to estimate the recency of a personal event. Another procedure that is often used is called the diary procedure, in which participants record personal events in a diary each day for several months. After the diary is completed, participants are asked to date events and assess how well they remember those events. Their recollections are then compared to the actual dates and details of the events in order to determine if telescoping has occurred.
Models and other explanations Researchers have examined possible reasons that the telescoping effect occurs. They have proposed the following hypotheses and models. The two models that are currently favored are the associative and boundary models.
Accessibility hypothesis Brown, Rips, and Shevell created the accessibility hypothesis. This hypothesis states that dates are estimated, not recalled, and these estimates are based on what is remembered about the event. People use how much detail they recall about an event to infer how long ago the event occurred. Therefore, memorable events should be recalled as occurring recently. Since these memorable events are recalled as occurring more recently, in general people overestimate the recency of events and forward telescoping occurs. For example, when people are asked to estimate the dates of the shooting of Ronald Reagan and Pope John Paul II, which occurred in the same year, they typically estimate that Ronald Reagan's shooting occurred more recently. Ronald Reagan's shooting is usually a more memorable event and was more heavily publicized, so the memory of this event was more accessible to participants, indicating that accessibility plays a role in the dating of events. However, these results are not always replicated, and sometimes the reverse is found. For this reason, other explanations have been presented to explain telescoping.
Conveyor belt model
Thompson et al. used the conveyor belt model of memory to explain forward telescoping. It assumes that events are stored in the order that they occur. When individuals try to remember the date of an event, they scan serially backward through memory. Since events are only remembered by order or time between events in this model, if an event is forgotten, previous events are recalled as if they occurred more recently and forward telescoping occurs. Another way of interpreting this theory is that people estimate the dates of events based on the number of personal events that have occurred since the target event. Since people underestimate memory loss over long periods of time, target events are moved closer to the present. Although this model explains forward telescoping, it does not explain backward telescoping.
Guessing Some psychologists have suggested that telescoping occurs because people are guessing the date of an event. According to this theory, if a person is unsure of a date, they minimize their chance of erring by placing events toward the middle of the period. However, telescoping occurs at the same frequency if events are remembered well or if events are not remembered well. Therefore, guessing is not a complete explanation for telescoping, and another one of these models is likely responsible.
Boundary model Rubin and Baddley created the boundary model to explain telescoping. When people date events, they often get information from a bounded period, such as a year or a vacation. This model assumes events are not assigned outside of the boundaries of this period, so dating errors can only move toward the middle of a boundary and that since recent events are dated more accurately, forward telescoping has a stronger effect. It postulates that, without boundaries, an estimation would be unbiased.
There is some evidence against the boundary model. A study by Lee and Brown in 2004 looked at how four different groups dated news events under different conditions. They found that the different boundaries had no effect on date estimation, and the existence of a boundary had no effect on date estimation. This study suggests that telescoping is not due solely to boundaries.
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