Every one of us runs the same shortcut, and every one of us believes we are the exception. The strange thing about the waiting room is not that it exists but that it works, most of the time, for most people. Consider the waiting room. It is a small thing, and small things are where habits live. The measure that matters is not what people say about restraint but what they do when nobody is scoring.
Where the model breaks
The usual story is that we are careless calculators. The better story is that we are careful about the wrong things. The strange thing about the waiting room is not that it exists but that it works, most of the time, for most people. The evidence here is thinner than the confident commentary suggests, and the honest position is a shrug with a direction of travel. It is tempting to call this irrational. It is more useful to ask what it is for.
