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The societal hallmark of the Covid‐19 pandemic was a set of mitigation measures such as lockdowns and curfews. The cognitive impact on the public of the resulting spatial, social and temporal constraints is still being investigated. While pandemic time has been extensively studied and mostly described as slowed down and elongated, opposite experimental patterns across national and social contexts leave open an important explanatory gap in order to understand which factor has been causally fundamental in determining the phenomenology of the crisis. In this paper, we use a quantitative questionnaire developed for measuring temporal and social disorientation on a sample of 3306 respondents during an acute phase of restrictions in France. We show that social disorientation greatly contributed to the temporal disruptions experienced during the pandemic. This result reinforces the importance for public authorities to address the compounding effect of feeling isolated during crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public transport disruptions are conducive to disorientation narratives in which the temporal aspects of the experience are central, but it is difficult to collect psychometric data at the moment of disruption to quantify the occurring underlying feelings. We propose a new real-time survey distribution method based on travellers' interaction with disruption announcements on social media. We analyse 456 responses in the Paris area and find that travellers experience time slowing down and their destination feeling temporally farther away when undergoing traffic disruptions. Time dilation is more pronounced for people filling out the survey while still presently experiencing the disruption, suggesting that over time people remember a compressed version of their disorientation. Conflicted time feelings about the disruption, e.g., both faster and slower feelings of the passage of time, appear the longer the recollection delay. Travellers in a stopped train seem to change their itinerary not because the alternative journey feels shorter (it does not), but because it makes time pass faster. Time distortions are phenomenological hallmarks of public transport disruptions, but these distortions are poor predictors of confusion per se. Public transport operators can alleviate the time dilation experienced by their travellers by clearly stating whether they should reorient or wait for recovery when incidents occur. Our real-time survey distribution method can be used for the psychological study of crises, where a timely and targeted distribution is of paramount importance.