If given the choice, would you prefer an experience that involves more pain or less pain?
The question sounds absurd, but you might be surprised by what researchers have found.
Daniel Kahneman, the late psychologist, Nobel laureate and author of the bestselling book Thinking, Fast and Slow, showed we often prefer experiences that are objectively worse if they end on a positive note.
This quirk has profound implications not just for how we recall pain, but for how we make decisions, evaluate our past, and structure our lives.
Kahneman’s famous study, When More Pain Is Preferred to Less: Adding a Better End, involved an experiment where one group of people submerged one hand in cold water for 60 seconds.
In a second experiment, people submerged the other hand in the cold water for 60 seconds but then kept it submerged for an additional 30 seconds as the temperature rose gradually.
Participants said they would prefer to repeat the second trial, even though it involved more total discomfort.
Why? The second trial ended on a less painful note, making it more tolerable in memory.
A similar effect was observed in a separate Kahneman study on colonoscopies (this was in the 1990s, when colonoscopies were more unpleasant than they are today).
Some patients experienced a standard, shorter procedure; others experienced the same procedure, only longer, with the extra minutes involving a little discomfort but not pain.
Like in the previous water experiment, the longer colonoscopy was objectively worse; after all, it involved the same level of pain, plus some extra minutes of discomfort.
However, those who endured the longer procedure rated their experience as less unpleasant and were more likely to return for future procedures.
Again, the difference lay in the ending. In the short colonoscopy, it ended with the patient in pain. In the longer colonoscopy, the patient was not in pain when the procedure ended.
‘Endings’, said Kahneman,‘are very, very important’.
This bias extends beyond physical pain to how we evaluate life experiences, including relationships, jobs, and even entire lives.
Kahneman’s book refers to another study which asked people to assess the life of a fictional woman. In one version of the story, she lived an extremely happy life and died suddenly at age 60.
In another version, she lived five additional years that were still pleasant but less joyful.
Participants judged the version in which she lived longer as worse overall, despite the extra years of happiness. T
his suggests when we evaluate a life, we focus less on its total sum of happiness and more on the average quality of a typical period, and especially how it ended.
Even Kahneman was stunned by the results: ‘In spite of my long experience with judgment errors, I did not believe that reasonable people could say that adding five slightly happy years to a life would make it substantially worse’, he wrote. ‘I was wrong’. The supporting data, he said, was ‘overwhelming’.
Remembering self Kahneman argued we have two selves.
There is the experiencing self, which lives in the present and feels events as they happen.
Then there is the remembering self, which constructs a narrative and maintains the story of our life.
The remembering self is unreliable, but it dominates our choices.
It is the one that judges experiences and influences future decisions, often at the expense of what might have been the best choice for the experiencing self.
Most of life’s experiences are not entirely good or entirely bad. Unfortunately, when looking back, we often forget this.
For example, take a couple that are happy together for five years.
Things then get rocky; in their last year together, they argue frequently and the relationship ends badly.
Some people might look back bitterly and see their relationship as unhappy, even toxic.
However, a bad ending shouldn’t erase five years of happiness. Similarly, maybe you had a pleasant day at work, but it ended badly when your boss called you on something.
Consequently, you may view the whole day negatively, even though most of it was perfectly pleasant.
By recognising this tendency, we can learn to see our experiences in a fuller, more balanced way, giving past joys their due, even when endings are less than perfect.
