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VIVA – When some people always late, it means that they are not arriving at a designated time or meeting a deadline as agreed or expected. Being late can cause inconvenience, frustration, or even harm to others, such as missing a flight, being late for a meeting, or causing delays in a project’s timeline.
The habit can be caused by some factors, including time perception, time management, and personality, experts say.
"There's likely a mechanism in the brain that causes some people to be late for meetings because they underestimate the time it will take them to get there," Hugo Spiers, a professor of cognitive neuroscience at University College London and the co-author of a 2017 study in the journal Hippocampus.
The hippocampus is a region of the brain that processes some aspects of time, such as remembering when to do something and how long it takes, Spiers said.
Research published in the journal Nature Reviews Neuroscience suggests that neurons in the hippocampus acting as "time cells" contribute to our perception and memory of events, but why exactly some people perpetually underestimate time is unclear.
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One factor may be how familiar we are with a space. For the 2017 study, Spiers asked 20 students who had newly moved to London to sketch a map of their college district and estimate travel times to different destinations.
While the students' place estimates expanded if they knew an area well, their gauge of travel time contracted with familiarity. "If you're very familiar with a place, you start to discount the hassle it will take," Spiers stated.
In some cases, people who are late may not factor enough time to complete tasks unrelated to travel, such as getting ready in the morning. Research published in the journal Memory & Cognition suggests that we make time estimates based on how long we think tasks have taken us in the past, but our memories and perceptions aren't always accurate.
"If we have a lot of experience performing a task, we are more likely to underestimate how long it will take," Emily Waldum an adjunct professor at Campbell University in North Carolina and the lead author of a 2016 study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General said.
In the study, Waldum found that environmental factors, such as music, can distort your sense of time.
Specifically, she showed that when doing a general knowledge questions task, some people incorrectly estimated the task's length based on the number of songs they heard playing in the background.
Younger adults tended to inflate their time estimates if they heard four short songs compared with two longer songs, something that didn't seem to influence older adults' perception of time.
In a 2022 study in the journal Virtual Reality, researchers asked participants to estimate the length of more or less crowded simulated subway trips. They found that crowded commutes felt like they took 10% longer than less busy rides, which was linked to it being an unpleasant experience.
Personality also plays a role in running late. Certain personality traits, such as reduced conscientiousness, can cause some people to forget tasks that they had planned ahead of time, Waldum said.
"Another factor that may influence a person's timeliness is how prone to multitasking they are," she added.
Research published in the journal Advances in Cognitive Psychology has shown that people juggling several tasks at once are less likely to remember and complete other scheduled tasks on time.
"The best-laid plans can fail simply because we don't have enough attentional resources left to carry them out successfully," Waldum informed.
