Thinking, Fast and Slow (44 page)

The subjects who preferred the long episode were not masochists and did not deliberately choose to expose themselves to the worse experience; they simply Jon the heigmade a mistake. If we had asked them, “Would you prefer a 90-second immersion or only the first part of it?” they would certainly have selected the short option. We did not use these words, however, and the subjects did what came naturally: they chose to repeat the episode of which they had the less aversive memory. The subjects knew quite well which of the two exposures was longer—we asked them—but they did not use that knowledge. Their decision was governed by a simple rule of intuitive choice: pick the option you like the most, or dislike the least. Rules of memory determined how much they disliked the two options, which in turn determined their choice. The cold-hand experiment, like my old injections puzzle, revealed a discrepancy between decision utility and experienced utility.

The preferences we observed in this experiment are another example of the less-is-more effect that we have encountered on previous occasions. One was Christopher Hsee’s study in which adding dishes to a set of 24 dishes lowered the total value because some of the added dishes were broken. Another was Linda, the activist woman who is judged more likely to be a feminist bank teller than a bank teller. The similarity is not accidental. The same operating feature of System 1 accounts for all three situations: System 1 represents sets by averages, norms, and prototypes, not by sums. Each cold-hand episode is a set of moments, which the remembering self stores as a prototypical moment. This leads to a conflict. For an objective observer evaluating the episode from the reports of the experiencing self, what counts is the “area under the curve” that integrates pain over time; it has the nature of a sum. The memory that the remembering self keeps, in contrast, is a representative moment, strongly influenced by the peak and the end.

Of course, evolution could have designed animals’ memory to store integrals, as it surely does in some cases. It is important for a squirrel to “know” the total amount of food it has stored, and a representation of the average size of the nuts would not be a good substitute. However, the integral of pain or pleasure over time may be less biologically significant. We know, for example, that rats show duration neglect for both pleasure and pain. In one experiment, rats were consistently exposed to a sequence in which the onset of a light signals that an electric shock will soon be delivered. The rats quickly learned to fear the light, and the intensity of their fear could be measured by several physiological responses. The main finding was that the duration of the shock has little or no effect on fear—all that matters is the painful intensity of the stimulus.

Other classic studies showed that electrical stimulation of specific areas in the rat brain (and of corresponding areas in the human brain) produce a sensation of intense pleasure, so intense in some cases that rats who can stimulate their brain by pressing a lever will die of starvation without taking a break to feed themselves. Pleasurable electric stimulation can be delivered in bursts that vary in intensity and duration. Here again, only intensity matters. Up to a point, increasing the duration of a burst of stimulation does not appear to increase the eagerness of the animal to obtain it. The rules that govern the remembering self of humans have a long evolutionary history.

Biology vs. Rationality

The most useful idea in the injections puzzle that preoccupied me years ago was that the experienced utility of a series of equally painful injections can be measured, by simply counting the injections. If all inj
ections are equally aversive, then 20 of them are twice as bad as 10, and Jon e oe e a reduction from 20 to 18 and a reduction from 6 to 4 are equally valuable. If the decision utility does not correspond to the experienced utility, then something is wrong with the decision. The same logic played out in the cold-hand experiment: an episode of pain that lasts 90 seconds is worse than the first 60 seconds of that episode. If people willingly choose to endure the longer episode, something is wrong with their decision. In my early puzzle, the discrepancy between the decision and the experience originated from diminishing sensitivity: the difference between 18 and 20 is less impressive, and appears to be worth less, than the difference between 6 and 4 injections. In the cold-hand experiment, the error reflects two principles of memory: duration neglect and the peak-end rule. The mechanisms are different but the outcome is the same: a decision that is not correctly attuned to the experience.

Decisions that do not produce the best possible experience and erroneous forecasts of future feelings—both are bad news for believers in the rationality of choice. The cold-hand study showed that we cannot fully trust our preferences to reflect our interests, even if they are based on personal experience, and even if the memory of that experience was laid down within the last quarter of an hour! Tastes and decisions are shaped by memories, and the memories can be wrong. The evidence presents a profound challenge to the idea that humans have consistent preferences and know how to maximize them, a cornerstone of the rational-agent model. An inconsistency is built into the design of our minds. We have strong preferences about the duration of our experiences of pain and pleasure. We want pain to be brief and pleasure to last. But our memory, a function of System 1, has evolved to represent the most intense moment of an episode of pain or pleasure (the peak) and the feelings when the episode was at its end. A memory that neglects duration will not serve our preference for long pleasure and short pains.

Speaking of Two Selves

Early in the days of my work on the measurement of experience, I saw Verdi’s opera
La Traviata
. Known for its gorgeous music, it is also a moving story of the love between a young aristocrat and Violetta, a woman of the demimonde. The young man’s father approaches Violetta and convinces her to give up her lover, to protect the honor of the family and the marriage prospects of the young man’s sister. In an act of supreme self-sacrifice, Violetta pretends to reject the man she adores. She soon relapses into consumption (the nineteenth-century term for tuberculosis). In the final act, Violetta lies dying, surrounded by a few friends. Her beloved has been alerted and is rushing to Paris to see her. H Kto earing the news, she is transformed with hope and joy, but she is also deteriorating quickly.

No matter how many times you have seen the opera, you are gripped by the tension and fear of the moment: Will the young lover arrive in time? There is a sense that it is immensely important for him to join his beloved before she dies. He does, of course, some marvelous love duets are sung, and after 10 minutes of glorious music Violetta dies.

On my way home from the opera, I wondered: Why do we care so much about those last 10 minutes? I quickly realized that I did not care at all about the length of Violetta’s life. If I had been told that she died at age 27, not age 28 as I believed, the news that she had missed a year of happy life would not have moved me at all, but the possibility of missing the last 10 minutes mattered a great deal. Furthermore, the emotion I felt about the lovers’ reunion would not have changed if I had learned that they actually had a week together, rather than 10 minutes. If the lover had come too late, however,
La Traviata
would have been an altogether different story. A story is about significant events and memorable moments, not about time passing. Duration neglect is normal in a story, and the ending often defines its character. The same core features appear in the rules of narratives and in the memories of colonoscopies, vacations, and films. This is how the remembering self works: it composes stories and keeps them for future reference.

It is not only at the opera that we think of life as a story and wish it to end well. When we hear about the death of a woman who had been estranged from her daughter for many years, we want to know whether they were reconciled as death approached. We do not care only about the daughter’s feelings—it is the narrative of the mother’s life that we wish to improve. Caring for people often takes the form of concern for the quality of their stories, not for their feelings. Indeed, we can be deeply moved even by events that change the stories of people who are already dead. We feel pity for a man who died believing in his wife’s love for him, when we hear that she had a lover for many years and stayed with her husband only for his money. We pity the husband although he had lived a happy life. We feel the humiliation of a scientist who made an important discovery that was proved false after she died, although she did not experience the humiliation. Most important, of course, we all care intensely for the narrative of our own life and very much want it to be a good story, with a decent hero.

The psychologist Ed Diener and his students wondered whether duration neglect and the peak-end rule would govern evaluations of entire lives. They used a short description of the life of a fictitious character called Jen, a never-married woman with no children, who died instantly and painlessly in an automobile accident. In one version of Jen’s story, she was extremely happy throughout her life (which lasted either 30 or 60 years), enjoying her work, taking vacations, spending time with her friends and on her hobbies. Another version added 5 extra years to Jen’s life, who now died either when she was 35 or 65. The extra years were described as pleasant but less so than before. After reading a schematic biography of Jen, each participant answered two questions: “Taking her life as a whole, how desirable do you think Jen’s life was?” and “How much total happiness or unhappiness would you say that Jen experienced in her life?”

The results provided clear evidence of both duration neglect and a peak-end effect. In a between-subjects experiment (different participants saw different forms), doubling the duration of Jen’s life had Jto Aad Jto no effect whatsoever on the desirability of her life, or on judgments of the total happiness that Jen experienced. Clearly, her life was represented by a prototypical slice of time, not as a sequence of time slices. As a consequence, her “total happiness” was the happiness of a typical period in her lifetime, not the sum (or integral) of happiness over the duration of her life.

As expected from this idea, Diener and his students also found a less-is-more effect, a strong indication that an average (prototype) has been substituted for a sum. Adding 5 “slightly happy” years to a very happy life caused a substantial drop in evaluations of the total happiness of that life.

At my urging, they also collected data on the effect of the extra 5 years in a within-subject experiment; each participant made both judgments in immediate succession. In spite of my long experience with judgment errors, I did not believe that reasonable people could say that adding 5 slightly happy years to a life would make it substantially worse. I was wrong. The intuition that the disappointing extra 5 years made the whole life worse was overwhelming.

The pattern of judgments seemed so absurd that Diener and his students initially thought that it represented the folly of the young people who participated in their experiments. However, the pattern did not change when the parents and older friends of students answered the same questions. In intuitive evaluation of entire lives as well as brief episodes, peaks and ends matter but duration does not.

The pains of labor and the benefits of vacations always come up as objections to the idea of duration neglect: we all share the intuition that it is much worse for labor to last 24 than 6 hours, and that 6 days at a good resort is better than 3. Duration appears to matter in these situations, but this is only because the quality of the end changes with the length of the episode. The mother is more depleted and helpless after 24 hours than after 6, and the vacationer is more refreshed and rested after 6 days than after 3. What truly matters when we intuitively assess such episodes is the progressive deterioration or improvement of the ongoing experience, and how the person feels at the end.

Amnesic Vacations

Consider the choice of a vacation. Do you prefer to enjoy a relaxing week at the familiar beach to which you went last year? Or do you hope to enrich your store of memories? Distinct industries have developed to cater to these alternatives: resorts offer restorative relaxation; tourism is about helping people construct stories and collect memories. The frenetic picture taking of many tourists suggests that storing memories is often an important goal, which shapes both the plans for the vacation and the experience of it. The photographer does not view the scene as a moment to be savored but as a future memory to be designed. Pictures may be useful to the remembering self—though we rarely look at them for very long, or as often as we expected, or even at all—but picture taking is not necessarily the best way for the tourist’s experiencing self to enjoy a view.

In many cases we evaluate touristic vacations by the story and the memories that we expect to store. The word
memorable
is often used to describe vacation highlights, explicitly revealing the goal of the experience. In other situations—love comes to mind—the declaration that the present moment will never be forgotten, though not always accurate, changes the character of the moment. A self-consciously memorable experience gains a weight and a significance Jto Ace Jto that it would not otherwise have.

Ed Diener and his team provided evidence that it is the remembering self that chooses vacations. They asked students to maintain daily diaries and record a daily evaluation of their experiences during spring break. The students also provided a global rating of the vacation when it had ended. Finally, they indicated whether or not they intended to repeat or not to repeat the vacation they had just had. Statistical analysis established that the intentions for future vacations were entirely determined by the final evaluation—even when that score did not accurately represent the quality of the experience that was described in the diaries. As in the cold-hand experiment, right or wrong, people
choose by memory
when they decide whether or not to repeat an experience.

A thought experiment about your next vacation will allow you to observe your attitude to your experiencing self.

While I have not formally studied the reactions to this scenario, my impression from discussing it with people is that the elimination of memories greatly reduces the value of the experience. In some cases, people treat themselves as they would treat another amnesic, choosing to maximize overall pleasure by returning to a place where they have been happy in the past. However, some people say that they would not bother to go at all, revealing that they care only about their remembering self, and care less about their amnesic experiencing self than about an amnesic stranger. Many point out that they would not send either themselves or another amnesic to climb mountains or trek through the jungle—because these experiences are mostly painful in real time and gain value from the expectation that both the pain and the joy of reaching the goal will be memorable.

For another thought experiment, imagine you face a painful operation during which you will remain conscious. You are told you will scream in pain and beg the surgeon to stop. However, you are promised an amnesia-inducing drug that will completely wipe out any memory of the episode. How do you feel about such a prospect? Here again, my informal observation is that most people are remarkably indifferent to the pains of their experiencing self. Some say they don’t care at all. Others share my feeling, which is that I feel pity for my suffering self but not more than I would feel for a stranger in pain. Odd as it may seem, I am my remembering self, and the experiencing self, who does my living, is like a stranger to me.

Speaking of Life as a Story