Reality versus Memory

The epic battle between reality and memory is an ancient and powerful one that takes place before us every day. These two competing selves (as Kahneman [2011] puts it), our “experiencing self” and our “remembering self,” frequently go head to head, and the results are anything but rational. Experiments frequently rely on “self-reports” after an experience, but how good are we really at remembering what emotions we have experienced in the recent past? Apparently, not that good, which may or may not be a problem, but it certainly raises some interesting questions for designers of digital experiences.

Take, for example, the famed colonoscopy study (Redelmeier & Kahneman, 1996), which turned our assumption that human beings are rational decision-making agents on its head. In a nutshell, patients who had longer procedures (that entailed more overall pain but ended on a less painful note) reported better experiences than patients who had shorter procedures that therefore involved less overall pain, but that ended at a more uncomfortable point.

Although the digital experiences we design are, fortunately, seldom as uncomfortable as colonoscopies were before anesthesia, the very same phenomenon has been demonstrated in other ways. One simple study showed that people will willingly choose to listen to an annoying sound for longer if the extra length means the listening experience ends more peaceably (described in Kahneman, 2000).

Such studies provide strong evidence for what is now referred to as a “peak–end rule,” which shows that our memories of events are not aggregations of our moment-by-moment experience, but rather a reconstruction based on what we felt at the peak of the experience and what we felt at the end of it. This has its parallels in our working-memory capacity, which remembers beginnings and ends of information lists more easily. Don Norman has suggested that in light of these facts about human psychology, it’s more important to design for remembered experience than to focus on perfecting moment-by-moment interaction (see his sidebar in this chapter for more detail).

Reality versus Memory

The epic battle between reality and memory is an ancient and powerful one that takes place before us every day. These two competing selves (as Kahneman [2011] puts it), our “experiencing self” and our “remembering self,” frequently go head to head, and the results are anything but rational. Experiments frequently rely on “self-reports” after an experience, but how good are we really at remembering what emotions we have experienced in the recent past? Apparently, not that good, which may or may not be a problem, but it certainly raises some interesting questions for designers of digital experiences.

Take, for example, the famed colonoscopy study (Redelmeier & Kahneman, 1996), which turned our assumption that human beings are rational decision-making agents on its head. In a nutshell, patients who had longer procedures (that entailed more overall pain but ended on a less painful note) reported better experiences than patients who had shorter procedures that therefore involved less overall pain, but that ended at a more uncomfortable point.

Although the digital experiences we design are, fortunately, seldom as uncomfortable as colonoscopies were before anesthesia, the very same phenomenon has been demonstrated in other ways. One simple study showed that people will willingly choose to listen to an annoying sound for longer if the extra length means the listening experience ends more peaceably (described in Kahneman, 2000).

Such studies provide strong evidence for what is now referred to as a “peak–end rule,” which shows that our memories of events are not aggregations of our moment-by-moment experience, but rather a reconstruction based on what we felt at the peak of the experience and what we felt at the end of it. This has its parallels in our working-memory capacity, which remembers beginnings and ends of information lists more easily. Don Norman has suggested that in light of these facts about human psychology, it’s more important to design for remembered experience than to focus on perfecting moment-by-moment interaction (see his sidebar in this chapter for more detail).
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