Construct · 1 fields · 3 citations

peak-end rule: a standalone construct

One name. One construct. A landmark on the map.

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peak-endrule1 CONSTRUCTPeak-end ruleKAHNEMAN · PEAK-END

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Psychology (judgment and decision-making)

Remembered value of an experience is set by its most intense moment and its end, not its duration

Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber, and Redelmeier (1993) first demonstrated the peak-end rule, showing that people's remembered evaluation of a past experience is predicted almost entirely by how the experience felt at its single most intense moment (the peak) and by how it felt at its end, rather than by how long it lasted. Redelmeier and Kahneman (1996) confirmed the pattern in a clinical setting, finding that patients' memories of painful medical procedures tracked the worst moment and the final moment, so that a longer procedure with a gentler ending was remembered as less unpleasant than a shorter one that ended at its worst. The rule is one expression of a broader finding these authors called duration neglect, the tendency for the total length of an episode to carry little weight in how the episode is later remembered (Fredrickson and Kahneman, 1993). What makes the peak-end rule a landmark is that it separates two quantities everyday intuition treats as one: the moment-by-moment experienced quality of an episode and the single retrospective judgment a person later forms of it, and it names which moments that judgment actually draws on.[1][2][3]

Unit
A predictive rule relating a remembered evaluation to the peak and final moments of an experience
Recovery means
Not applicable
Measured by
Compared moment-by-moment real-time affect ratings during an episode against a single retrospective rating of the whole episode

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Nearby constructs

memory6 fields · 18 citationsjingle · one name, six constructsutility3 fields · 3 citationsjingle · one word, three constructswell-being4 names · 5 citationsjangle · one word, four well-beings

References

  1. Kahneman, D., Fredrickson, B. L., Schreiber, C. A., & Redelmeier, D. A. (1993). When more pain is preferred to less: Adding a better end. Psychological Science, 4(6), 401–405. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.1993.tb00589.x
  2. Redelmeier, D. A., & Kahneman, D. (1996). Patients' memories of painful medical treatments: Real-time and retrospective evaluations of two minimally invasive procedures. Pain, 66(1), 3–8. https://doi.org/10.1016/0304-3959(96)02994-6
  3. Fredrickson, B. L., & Kahneman, D. (1993). Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(1), 45–55. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.65.1.45

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