The Narrative Arc of Conflict
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What’s going on here? Gawande’s puzzle is that we seem not to evaluate the experience – good or bad – but rather report on a recollection of the experience. In describing medical experiences – certainly those involving some pain – patients recall either the worst or the most recent moment. An accounting of the experience at the time tends to differ from a recall of the total experience afterwards.
This is where Gawande turns to Kahneman who has researched and reported on research on this very question. The curious thing is that subjects/patients/disputants tend to ignore the duration of the experience and instead report on what Kahneman calls the “Peak-End” rule. That is, they report on the whole experience from the perspective of either the worst or most recent moment. Experimental inquiry also runs into less traumatic realms than surgery and pain in which, for example, subjects are asked to rate the experience of a vacation that has been positive and relaxing until some last minute hitch – a theft, a poor hotel experience, say. Subjects typically rated the overall experience more poorly because of the single “peak” or “end” event.
Kahneman admits to having been puzzled by this, but notes the repeated experimental evidence that – as he says – confirms that this reflects our two “selves”: the “experiencing” self, enduring (or enjoying) each moment; and the “remembering” self, giving almost all weight or judgment to the worst moment or the most recent moment. The “remembering self seems to stick to the Peak-End rule even when the ending is an anomaly” (Gawande, 237).
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