#kahnman

Peak-end rule says that people judge an experience based mostly on how they felt at its peak, for example, its most intense point, and at its end. As opposed to a person judging an experience based on the whole average of the experience, taking into account everything that happened. It is, however, not the case that other information before and between the peak and end of the experience is forgotten, but rather it is not used in reaching a decision or judgement on the experience. This process occurs whether or not the experience is positive or not. We see an example of this with movies as well. We are more likely to recommend a movie that has a slow start but an amazing ending than a movie that has an amazing start but a bad ending. This heuristic theory helps people to make a conclusion on an experience easily and can have a profound effect on how we view an experience even if it was all round a positive experience, we can view it negatively because it didn’t have a peak. This is important as it can be applied to real life in things such as movies, to make sure that there is a peak and a good end will ensure that the movie is a success.

Kahneman did an experiment to test the peak-end rule. He did this by asking participants to hold their hand in a bowl of freezing cold water until they were asked to remove them. Researchers used two conditions: the first was 60 seconds of immersion in water at 14 degrees Celsius. After the time was up they were told to take their hand out the water. The second condition lasted for 90 seconds, with the first 60 seconds being the exact same as the first condition but after that time for the last 30 seconds, the researcher poured slightly warmer water into the bowl, raising the overall temperature by about 1 degree. After they have completed the two conditions participants were told they were to undertake one more trial which was to be a repeat of either condition 1 or 2. The participants were asked which they would rather repeat, and results showed that 80% chose the second condition. This supports the peak-end rule as participants chose the second option even though the first would've been the smarter choice as both conditions would have the same level of pain for the same amount of time, but after that time, condition 1 gets to finish and condition 2 gets a slight decrease in pain for an extra 30 seconds.