Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Decisions over the timing of actions are critical in severalsafety, security and healthcare scenarios. These decisions, sim-ilar to discrete decisions, can be influenced by biases and in-dividual traits. In this paper, a bias of impatience is studiedin an experiment with 626 participants, with a focus on gen-der differences. Impatience was moderated with a manipula-tion of a variable-speed countdown. Men and women differedin how they expressed impatience. While men systematicallyand irrationally act earlier when become impatient followingthe slower countdowns, women react by irrationally request-ing earlier information about the outcome of each trial, andimpulsively pressing an inactive key.