A General-Purpose IT Intervention to Improve Human Decision Making, Strengthen Passwords, and Reduce Receptivity to Misinformation

Latency—the delay between a user’s action and a system’s response—is often viewed as a problem to be eliminated. Yet our research shows that latency is not always harmful and can even improve decision making under the right conditions. Across two sets of studies, we find that latency enhances decision accuracy when it occurs after task-relevant information has been presented but before a decision is made. In these cases, the pause functions as a “mental speed bump,” prompting users to shift from quick, intuitive judgments to slower, more reflective thinking. However, when latency occurs without relevant content, performance declines, likely because of mind wandering and disengagement. For practitioners, this means that latency can be deliberately integrated into system design to encourage deeper cognitive processing in high-stakes or complex tasks, such as financial decisions, medical diagnostics, or security-critical actions. For policymakers, the findings suggest a shift in focus: rather than universally minimizing latency, standards and best practices could account for situations in which strategic delays benefit user outcomes. By reframing latency as a design variable rather than a nuisance, organizations can leverage it to support more accurate, thoughtful decision making, improving performance in contexts in which getting the right answer matters most.