There is some social psychology and operations research around this -- not necessarily as it relates to human/machine interactions, but certainly as it relates

There is some social psychology and operations research around this -- not necessarily as it relates to human/machine interactions, but certainly as it relates to such quasi-analogous situations as call centers, lines, speed vs. variability of service at McDonald's, and so forth. The premise being practiced by Facebook takes a lot of cues from behavioral science data that is generalizable to many different domains. McDonald's, to give a famous example, proved analytically a few years back that -- beyond a certain threshold of commonly expected service times -- their customers would rather get semi-slow service on a consistent basis than highly variable service. In a perfect world, of course, average wait times are as short as possible in addition to a minimization of variance. But when you're at the level of acceptability, there are diminishing returns on speed increases and increasing returns on reduced variance.