A friendly robot greets me on Facebook. He’s dressed like a doctor, stethoscope and all, here to do a security checkup. So for the next 5 to 10 seconds, I wait as he pokes and prods my account. “He’s really taking good care of me!” I think, when I start to wonder: Are Facebook’s servers really taking that long?

The short answer is no. Facebook actually slows down its interface to make users feel safe, a Facebook spokesperson confirmed in an email. “While our systems perform these checks at a much faster speed than people can actually see, it’s important that they understand what we do behind the scenes to protect their Facebook account,” the spokesperson wrote. “UX can be a powerful education tool and walking people through this process at a slower speed allows us to provide a better explanation and an opportunity for people to review and understand each step along the way.”

If half of Facebook’s billion users spend 5 seconds waiting on this check, that’s 694,444 hours, or 28,935 days of collective time lost. But Facebook isn’t alone. Websites and apps now operate on the magnitude of milliseconds. But such speed can make users skeptical or even confused, so companies are responding by building slower, more deliberate interfaces. Wells Fargo admitted to slowing down its app’s retinal scanners, because customers didn’t realize they worked otherwise, while various services on the web including travel sites, mortgage engines, and security checks are all making a conscious effort to slow down their omnipotent minds because our puny human brains expect things to take longer.

“Let’s say you sit down at a restaurant, you order your food, and it comes out one minute later. Is that a good thing?” asks Braden Kowitz, design partner at Google Ventures (which has more than 250 portfolio companies including Uber, Slack, and Nest). “You start to wonder, ‘What’s going on here? Is something wrong in the kitchen?'”

So companies introduce what Kowitz calls an “artificial waiting” pattern into their interfaces. These are status bars, maybe a few update messages, to construct a facade of slow, hard, thoughtful work, even though the computer is done calculating your query.

Kowitz says he has only used artificial waiting a few times in the design sprints he runs through Google Ventures, and only when instantaneous results weren’t working. In one case, he was working on a loan approval app. The back end was atypically fast. It could get someone a true lender-backed mortgage instantly. But when the app makers put that experience in the hands of consumers, people responded in disbelief. “When they saw it, they were like, ‘I’m pre-approved but not really approved,'” he says. So the designers added a progress bar that said it was checking credit, and suddenly, the same system seemed trustworthy.

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Likewise, Steven Hoober, president at the consultancy 4ourth Mobile, was developing a service plan optimizer for a cell-phone carrier–a system that looked at a customer’s cell-phone usage and suggested the most bang-for-your-buck plan. “My guys built this tool–it took single digit milliseconds to get the results back. And it was giving [accurate] results, not just some plan we wanted to sell them,” Hoober says. “But when we tested with people, they assumed it was all marketing bullshit because it was instantaneous. They’d say, ‘This was obviously a canned result, I’m just gonna shop myself.'”