“One-second wait”: A simple and effective intervention to boost judgment accuracy

Today, an increasing number of people work online. However, they are often separated from each other or often drop out of tasks due to workload, and sometimes do not perform the task well (e.g., making incorrect judgments). Therefore, there is a growing need for an intervention to ensure the job performance of distributed workers. In this study, we propose a simple and cost-effective intervention to improve judgment accuracy, namely, making people wait for one second at the beginning of a task. We examined whether inserting a short time (e.g., one second) during which people cannot respond to a task enhances an appropriate allocation of cognitive resources into thinking tasks. Through behavioral experiments using a perceptual binary-choice task, we found that participants who waited for 1s showed higher accuracy than those assigned to a control group (i.e., waited for 0s) and felt less mental workload than those who waited for 2.5s. Furthermore, analyses of mouse trajectories during choice behaviors revealed that a waiting time helped participants avoid impulsive or “straight” movements. These results suggest that waiting for one second is an effective intervention to boost people’s competence regarding judgments. We believe that our proposed intervention can be applied in various fields because of its simplicity.