Stand in front of two whiskey bottles. One says “10 years old.” The other says “distilled in 2015.” They’re the same age. Your brain knows this. But one probably feels older, more valuable, worth a few extra dollars.
New research from UBC’s Sauder School of Business shows this isn’t just you. The way we frame time, whether as a span or a calendar year, fundamentally warps how long it feels. And that perception drives real money. Whiskey bottles labeled by age fetch about 9% more at auction than bottles labeled by year. The same interval. Different price tags.
Dr. Deepak Sirwani and his team call it the “year-length effect.” They combined auction data with seven experiments to prove what marketers have probably intuited for decades: “10 years” simply feels longer than “2015 to 2025.” The gap is consistent across contexts, and it flips depending on whether age helps or hurts what you’re selling.
The Mental Number Line Is Warped
The culprit is how our brains represent numbers. We don’t see them on a straight ruler. The mental number line is logarithmic, compressed at the high end. The jump from 1 to 2 feels enormous. The jump from 2024 to 2025 feels like barely anything.
“Our mental number line is logarithmic, meaning the difference between numbers feels smaller as they increase. The difference between 11 and 12 feels smaller than the difference between two and three,” Sirwani explains.
When time is described as a length, say 10 years, your brain anchors on that smaller number. It sits in the less-compressed part of your mental scale, so the interval feels substantial. When the same time is framed as 2015 to 2025, those big numbers compress together. The gap feels shorter.
This creates a time warp with commercial consequences. Sellers listing used goods on Craigslist earned about 17% more when they mentioned the purchase year instead of the item’s age. Calendar dates made sofas and electronics feel newer, less worn. For whiskey, tradition, and anything where age signals quality, you want the opposite. Talk in years. Let time stretch.
Beyond Shopping
The effect isn’t limited to consumer goods. Sirwani’s team argues it applies to retirement planning, medical decisions, climate deadlines. A policy target set for “2046” might feel distant and abstract. Call it “20 years from now” and urgency creeps in. The interval hasn’t changed, but the framing rewires how we feel about it.
There’s no universally better way to describe time. The choice depends on what you’re trying to communicate. If you need people to grasp how much time has passed or how far away something is, use the span. If you want to compress time, make it feel manageable or recent, use the dates.
Understanding this won’t stop the clock. But it might change how we think about what’s ahead and how we value what’s behind us.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437251399115
ScienceBlog.com has no paywalls, no sponsored content, and no agenda beyond getting the science right. Every story here is written to inform, not to impress an advertiser or push a point of view.
Good science journalism takes time — reading the papers, checking the claims, finding researchers who can put findings in context. We do that work because we think it matters.
If you find this site useful, consider supporting it with a donation. Even a few dollars a month helps keep the coverage independent and free for everyone.