Have you ever been happy to see that it was Friday, before realizing that it was actually only Thursday? These confusions in the days of the week are frequent. British researchers wanted to identify the psychological mechanisms that are at the origin.
For this, researchers at the School of Psychology at the University of Lincoln in England conducted three studies with three different types of tests.
For the first study, they tested 1,115 people with a questionnaire, on their notion of time by comparing a normal week with one where Monday was a holiday. Results: Errors increase by more than half for the week beginning with a holiday. The participants felt they were living a day late.
Monday and Friday, the key days of the week
The second study focused on 65 students undergraduates at the University of Glasgow, 47 women and 18 men with an average age of 20. In these tests, the researchers wanted to see how quickly they could tell when the day was right. For Monday and Friday, the response was twice as fast as for other days of the week.
The third study brought together 60 volunteers from the same university. This time they had to say which word they associated with the days of the week. For Monday, the associations were strongly negative and for Friday, on the contrary, very positive. For the other days of the week, the mental representations are more similar, which makes them more easily confused.
To conclude their research, scientists explain that the social construction of natural cycles plays a role in our thinking. Holidays, vacation, symbolic force of the day are all elements that can disrupt the cycles of time, which we have nevertheless well integrated.
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