Telescoping Bias
Telescoping Effect
The time displacement of an event where people perceive recent events as being more remote than they are (backward telescoping) and distant events as being more recent than they are (forward telescoping).
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Origin
Statisticians John Neter and Joseph Waksberg coined the term in a 1964 paper in the Journal of the American Statistical Association, drawn from a U.S. Census Bureau study of household expenditure surveys. They named the pattern after the telescope — the way its lens compresses distance — and devised "bounded recall" interviews to counteract it. Norman Bradburn later extended the concept into cognitive survey psychology through his influential work in the 1970s and 1980s.
Updated February 22, 2026