Time judgment during a crisis: The moderating effect of stress and ego network diversity on retrospective time judgments

Forming accurate judgments is vital for management in general, and crisis management in particular. Despite its fundamental role in an organizational context, time judgments were not yet studied in a crisis context. Building on attentional-gate theory, we hypothesized that when decision-makers are under high information load, they can suffer from less accurate retrospective (i.e. recalled) time judgments. Furthermore, we expected this effect to be enhanced if stress and ego network diversity were also at higher levels. We tested our hypotheses in a within-subject experimental design (information load: low vs. high) where participants (N = 34) role-played a disaster-response management team. We found that participants had less accurate and underestimating time judgments when information load was high, and this effect was more evident when stress levels were higher. Contrary to our expectations, the effect of information load on time judgments was not observed when ego network diversity was high, whereas a low level of diversity was associated with less accuracy under high information load. Our findings contribute to our understanding of the antecedents and boundary conditions of retrospective time judgments for crisis management.