Katy Milkman: Think back to a recent vacation. What pieces of the trip do you remember most clearly? Probably an exciting moment, a trip highlight or low point, maybe swimming with dolphins or an evening of fireworks, or maybe it was when your tour bus broke down. Maybe it was seeing an old friend for the first time in years or laughing so hard with them that it hurt.
You probably don't immediately recall the details of the Uber ride you took to the airport or the small talk you made with a concierge who offered you restaurant recommendations, and that's not an accident. It's because of an interesting way our minds selectively retain some parts of past experiences and memory while discarding others. In this episode, we've chosen to take a look at a predictable distortion in the way people remember experiences, and we're doing it in part to honor a very special memory, the memory of the great Daniel Kahneman—Nobel laureate, international best-selling author, repeated Choiceology guest, and a co-founder of a field that is at the heart of the show: behavioral economics.
Danny passed away in the spring of 2024 as we were wrapping up taping for our last podcast season, and we've created this episode as a way of honoring him. The topic we'll dive into today is one Danny studied late in his career, and it can have implications for the way we experience and remember the best moments of our lives, how medical procedures are designed, and even how we remember the lives of our favorite celebrities.
Speaker 2: Well-known action movie actor Bruce Lee's sudden death has shaken many people in Hong Kong. Before he was a Hong Kong action movie …
Katy Milkman: I'm Dr. Katy Milkman, and this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true and surprising stories about high-stakes choices, and then we examine how these stories connect to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgments and avoid costly mistakes.
Matthew Polly: Bruce Lee, the way you think about him is he's the patron saint of kung fu.
Katy Milkman: This is Matthew.
Matthew Polly: Hi, my name is Matthew Polly. I'm the best-selling author of Bruce Lee: A Life, a biography of the late great Bruce Lee.
Katy Milkman: We've asked Matthew on the show to compare the memory of Bruce Lee with a more complete story of his life. Matthew was a serious fan from a young age.
Matthew Polly: When I was growing up, Bruce Lee's Enter the Dragon was my favorite film, and he was a star that I followed, followed so far that I went to the Shaolin Temple in China where I studied kung fu with the monks for two-plus years.
Katy Milkman: So what was it that Matthew found so compelling about this action hero? It starts with his popular origin story.
Matthew Polly: Bruce Lee was a kind of rebellious kid. He was the black sheep of his family. His older brother was the dedicated student, and Bruce Lee was the one who was always getting in trouble. He had a little group of boys who followed him around, and they would get into street fights, and Bruce liked to think of himself as the toughest street fighter in all of Hong Kong. At the age of about 14, he met a boy who was better than him, and Bruce Lee couldn't stand the idea of anybody being a better fighter than he was. And so he asked him, "How are you so good?" and the boy said, "I study under the master Ip Man." So Bruce said, "Why don't you take me to this master," and he showed up, but he had slicked-back hair, he was wearing sunglasses, and the instructor said he looked like a kind of Elvis character, and so they kicked him out of the class. So Bruce Lee had to come back in a much more humble way and beg them to teach him.
Katy Milkman: Bruce Lee finally did receive proper martial arts instruction from this master, but he wouldn't use it to his advantage for long, at least not in the way he expected. His parents sent him to the United States at age 18 to curb his street fighting and his run-ins with the police. He finished high school in Seattle and went on to study philosophy and drama at the University of Washington. The philosophy part is notable.
Matthew Polly: Bruce Lee quotes populate the internet, and oftentimes I run into people who say, "I wasn't interested in his martial arts, but his philosophy really touched me." So there's an aspect of Bruce Lee where he's the philosopher warrior. He's that combination of the brain and the brawn, and that's part of his kind of iconic image and makes him a unique figure within the cultural firmament. So the most famous quote attributed to Bruce Lee is, "Be like water."
Katy Milkman: OK. Hold that iconic quote in your memory, "Be like water." We'll come back to it.
In the mid-1960s, Bruce Lee developed his own martial arts discipline called Jeet Kune Do. It blended ancient kung fu, fencing, boxing, and philosophy, emphasizing practicality and adaptability. And he wanted to introduce this new style to a wide audience. His breakthrough came when he was cast as the superhero sidekick Kato in the television series The Green Hornet in 1966. Despite the show's cancellation after only one season, Bruce Lee's fame grew, and he began teaching Jeet Kune Do to Hollywood stars like Steve McQueen and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. From there he went on to work as a movie fight choreographer and action director, eventually starring in feature-length Hong Kong action movies in the early-1970s. Fist of Fury and The Way of the Dragon made Bruce Lee a superstar.
Matthew Polly: He had become the biggest star in East Asia. He would call his friends up and say, "I'm bigger than the Beatles." He couldn't walk down the street without being mobbed. He was full-on in Hong Kong the biggest star they'd ever seen, and so he did have that sense of himself as the king of the world. He was right at the peak of mass fame.
Katy Milkman: Then on July 20th, 1973, tragedy struck. Lee had met with Australian actor George Lazenby that morning in Hong Kong to discuss a film role. Later he visited his girlfriend, Taiwanese actress Betty Ting Pei, and complained of a headache. After taking one of her prescription pain medications, Lee lay down on Betty's bed and never woke up. Despite efforts to revive him, he was declared dead at the age of 32. The official cause of death was swelling of the brain due to an allergic reaction to a headache medication.
Speaker 4: Today is Sunday, July 21st. Now comes a special report. Wuxia film star Bruce Lee died suddenly late last night at 11:30. He was 32 years old.
Katy Milkman: It was such a dramatic and untimely end, particularly for a man in top physical condition and someone who was in the middle of a meteoric rise to international stardom. Fans were shocked. Many couldn't accept the official explanation for his death, and rumors began to swirl. To this day, over 50 years later, dedicated fans continue to argue about the details and true cause of Bruce Lee's death.
Speaker 5: And finally, martial arts fans gathered at Hong Kong's Victoria Harbour on Thursday to mark the 50th anniversary of Bruce Lee's death. Meeting in front of the statue …
Katy Milkman: In the span of a few short years, from his appearance in The Green Hornet to his star turns in Hong Kong action films to his sudden death at 32, Bruce Lee's reputation as a martial arts legend was cemented. In fact, his fame grew even more with the release of the movie Enter the Dragon six days after his death.
Matthew Polly: His movie Enter the Dragon was the first martial arts movie made by a Western studio. It made like $400 million at the box office.
Katy Milkman: It was a remarkable turn of events that made Bruce Lee a household name in America and beyond, and his influence lives on.
Matthew Polly: Bruce Lee is considered the great popularizer of martial arts. Prior to Bruce Lee, there were maybe 10,000 Americans who did karate. After Bruce Lee, there were millions. And so every time you go past a strip mall and you see a Taekwondo studio, that's there because Bruce Lee popularized the sport and the art form.
Katy Milkman: He was a trailblazer for Asian American actors in Hollywood, and his legacy extended beyond martial arts movies, inspiring generations of performers and fans.
Matthew Polly: So the image of Bruce Lee in the public mind is this cultural innovator who was also a philosophical genius and the world's greatest fighter combined into one 5'7" human being. And so he has become the kind of icon of every picked-on boy who thinks, "If I study martial arts, I could be as bad as Bruce Lee."
Katy Milkman: The thing is, Bruce Lee's peak fame and his untimely death tend to distort how we see and remember the story of his life. Many casual Bruce Lee fans believe him to be one of the greatest martial arts fighters of all time, a beacon of Eastern philosophy, and a man who could do no wrong.
Matthew Polly: Anybody who does something amazing often gets built up beyond what they actually did. Every once in a while, someone moves beyond the human into this kind of archetypal status. They become a figure out of a past warrior mythos or King Arthur.
Katy Milkman: Because he's a modern hero, and because much of his life has been documented, we know that Bruce Lee, the man, as opposed to Bruce Lee, the superhuman action hero, was complicated and fallible, just like the rest of us. And his story is not nearly as straightforward as the popular narrative, starting with where he was born and when he actually started appearing in films.
Matthew Polly: So a lot of people don't know that Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco, and that's because his father was an actor. He was a stage actor who'd come to the U.S. on tour. So Bruce Lee's first film, he appeared as a three-month-old and played a baby girl. And what that tells us is that Bruce Lee, whose movie career really began at six, was an actor from the very beginning. He came from an entertainment family. That's who he was. That's how he identified. Martial arts was something that was an interest of his when he became a teenager.
Katy Milkman: It might be surprising to learn that an iconic celebrity who was so deeply tied to Hong Kong, to Chinese culture, and to martial arts, and seemed to come out of nowhere as a TV and movie star in the late-1960s and early-1970s, had actually been born in the U.S. and had been involved in movie-making from the very beginning of his life rather than kung fu.
Matthew Polly: Bruce Lee was born in San Francisco, but his parents moved back to Hong Kong, which was their home, when he was about five months old, and he lived there under the Japanese occupation during World War II. Once the war ended, he started a career as a child actor.
Katy Milkman: And he wasn't an action star. In fact, quite the opposite.
Matthew Polly: People often say he was kind of the Macaulay Culkin of Hong Kong. He didn't do kung fu movies or action. He played weepies and comedies. He was usually a kind of orphan with a heart of gold. So Bruce Lee really grew up in a background in Hong Kong. He went to very good schools, he spoke English, and he appeared in nearly 20 films and really established himself as a young heartthrob.
Katy Milkman: Not only was his early screen career very different from what he's most known for, it was also a much longer road leading to his seemingly overnight success. And while Bruce Lee really did become a skilled martial artist as a young man, his contribution to the discipline wasn't necessarily about introducing traditional kung fu to the West, but rather adapting it into something new that could more easily be embraced by pop culture.
Matthew Polly: Bruce Lee was an innovator in the martial arts because the martial arts were such a conservative art form. The idea was whatever your master told you was law, and that's because it had been passed down to him through generations. You weren't supposed to find your own personal authentic voice like you do in any other art form. You were supposed to do exactly what you'd been told. And so Bruce Lee really had a kind of Western sensibility, which was you're supposed to adapt the style to what you as the individual need and want and express yourself through the art of martial arts. So in many ways, he was kind of a '60s hippie taking this kind of liberation ideology and bringing it to Eastern martial arts.
Katy Milkman: It's funny to think of Bruce Lee as a kind of hippie counterculture figure, but compared to traditional masters of martial arts, he was just that. In our collective memory, Bruce Lee is viewed as this exotic, monk-like figure who brought not only fighting prowess, but also Eastern philosophy, to mainstream popular culture.
Matthew Polly: We remember Bruce Lee as this stoic, philosophical Shaolin monk, who's totally a tough guy, can't be beat, but is also quite wise and quite isolated. And that in fact was not who Bruce Lee was as a person. He grew up as an actor. He was extremely charming. He loved being in groups and telling raunchy jokes, and as he got older, he loved the lifestyle of being a celebrity. He had a full-length mink coat. He owned a Porsche. When he died, he died in his mistress's bed. These are not the activities of a warrior monk. These are the activities of your typical 1970s celebrity. So the image of him as this kind of person who's come out of the mountain to deliver the wisdom to us and beat the bad guys, very much a film image, became part of his personal biography, even though his personal biography was very typical of a Hollywood actor in the late '60s or '70s.
Katy Milkman: So our collective memory of Bruce Lee is not quite accurate. And remember that quote, the one attributed to Bruce Lee that led him to be venerated as a warrior monk, "Be like water"?
Matthew Polly: What's interesting about that is that's a straight pull from Laozi's, the Tao Te Ching, which any 15-year-old growing up in Hong Kong would know because it's one of the basic texts. It's like "Love thy neighbor." "Be like water" is a very common phrase. And then he taught that to Stirling Silliphant, a screenwriter, and Stirling Silliphant wrote a part for Bruce Lee in which Bruce Lee says, "Be like water." And then Bruce Lee repeated it, and so it became a kind of whole circle where Bruce Lee was using this very common phrase, and it's now become attributed to him, to the point where Hong Kong protesters very recently were arguing that they should be like water against the government. And so Bruce Lee's popularization of an ancient Taoist phrase has become a part of his legacy.
Katy Milkman: So why is our collective memory of Bruce Lee, the action hero, so different from the nuanced story of Bruce Lee, the man? In part, it's due to the power of his performances and the hype of the film industry and pop culture generally, but it may also be due to the way we encode memories. When remembering Bruce Lee, many fans primarily recall the peak of his fame, the portion of his life when he was an international celebrity, and his dramatic and tragic end, but most other details of his story are forgotten. Like many famous figures who died young, think James Dean or River Phoenix or Selena or Amy Winehouse, our memories tend to coalesce around an image of them at the apex of their career and a recollection of their tragic conclusion. But when we think of them, we don't tend to remember other parts of their stories. Bruce Lee was a remarkable figure, but our fixation on the peak and end of his career has left an inaccurate impression in our collective memory of the more complete arc of his too-short life.
Matthew Polly: Bruce Lee said to someone, "I was never a saint, but I wasn't as bad as the rest of them," and I think what he was thinking about was he was friends with Steve McQueen and other Hollywood actors at that time; they were his students. And compared to Steve McQueen, Bruce Lee was a saint. But of course, compared to the image of him, he was pretty much a standard 1960s Hollywood actor. He had affairs, he used drugs, he spent more money than he took in, so he was always in financial trouble, and he had a terrible temper, which he knew and he tried to control, but he would go off the handle and get into fights he shouldn't have. He said things to people and broke up friendships. So he was a flawed human being like the rest of us, and on the other side, extremely charming and loving and could be quite friendly and generous. Bruce Lee was like any young person in the process of becoming the person he wanted to be, but by the time he died tragically at the age of 32, he certainly hadn't achieved enlightenment. He had a long journey to go.
Katy Milkman: Matthew Polly is the best-selling author of the biography Bruce Lee: A Life. You can find a link to the book in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.
Our collective memory of Bruce Lee's life is an illustration of a tendency we all have to overlook many aspects of a past experience, or in this case, a character, but also to amplify and recall with particular vividness certain predictable components, specifically the peak and the end. This bias in our memories was first identified by the late great economics Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who passed away earlier this year at the age of 90 after an illustrious and incredibly productive career. Danny's peak for which he'll be best remembered came about in the second half of the last century when he co-authored a series of path-breaking papers with fellow psychologist Amos Tversky. These papers described an array of mental shortcuts people reliably use, now known as heuristics and biases, that produce predictable errors in judgment. And that work laid the foundation for the then-new field of behavioral economics.
In his last years, he became an intellectual celebrity, winning a Nobel Prize, a Presidential Medal of Freedom, penning a mega-bestseller called Thinking, Fast and Slow, and being the focus of Michael Lewis's best-selling book The Undoing Project. It's notable that Danny's own research with Barbara Fredrickson could have helped him predict the fact that we'll primarily remember him for his peak accomplishments and his final celebrity, and not as the young boy whose father narrowly escaped deportation to a Nazi death camp, or whose family found refuge in a chicken coop in Vichy, France, or as the perfectionist academic who could never make up his mind about whether an idea was good or bad, or as the ballet enthusiast, or lover of a perfectly cooked branzino, and I want to dig into why that is. It has to do with what's called the peak-end rule. My next guest has done some fascinating research into how this rule of memory can influence our willingness to stick to challenging goals and how we can leverage it to make life and work more manageable.
Maurice Schweitzer is a colleague of mine at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. He's the Cecilia Yen Koo Professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions. Hi, Maurice. Thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
Maurice Schweitzer: I'm very happy to be here.
Katy Milkman: I just want to kick off by asking you to define the peak-end effect. How would you define this phenomenon?
Maurice Schweitzer: Sure. So the peak-end effect is an interesting effect that really was led by a lot of work by Danny Kahneman, where when we recall some event, we tend not to recall it as complete recap of what happened. Instead, our evaluations are particularly influenced by the peak. So imagine an airplane flight and you had some turbulence; that could be the peak part of that flight. And then the end, so it could be you have delayed baggage, and those two moments, those two pieces of the experience, weigh particularly heavily on your recollection of that whole event. And one thing that's sort of interesting, it's also been called duration neglect because the full duration of the event tends not to be so influential in how we recall something, and as a result we're really influenced by this peak and this end and not so much by the full length of what just happened. That means that we can actually make some mistakes. That is, the way we recall an event might not be the same as what our moment-to-moment experience of the event was really like.
Katy Milkman: I love that. I always think of going to Phillies games because we both live in Philadelphia, and if there's a really exciting play, I'll remember that and not the six hours of sitting through nothing happening. And at the very end, if they pull it out, then I might be more likely to go to the next game if there was that awesome peak and forget about the maybe duller moments that I had to sit through. Does that sum it up for you too, or do you have other examples?
Maurice Schweitzer: Well, that's exactly right. So it, I think, offers us opportunities to really influence the full experience that people have, or at least the one that they recall. And Danny ran studies where he ended up making things objectively worse, but retrospectively better. He did one with cold water, and the study with cold water had people put their arms in cold water at 14 degrees centigrade for 60 seconds, and that's unpleasantly cold. He also had people switch arms and do it for the same 60 seconds at 14 degrees centigrade but then added on 30 seconds where the temperature rose to 15 degrees centigrade. Still unpleasant, but less so.
And then when he brought people and said, "OK, you went through these two experiences, which one would you choose for the second time? Now we're going to do another one," and 65% chose the longer trial. There's the longer experience that was objectively worse, but retrospectively seemed less aversive because of the ending. So I wanted to start there because that's, I think, a very sort of simple, easy-to-imagine study.
Katy Milkman: It's such a fascinating study. I want to talk about some of your recent research studying the peak-end effect in a really different context. But before we get there, I actually just wanted to ask you a little bit about mechanism. Do you feel like we have a good sense of why people focus so much on the peak and the end as opposed to integrating all of their experiences in a more rational manner?
Maurice Schweitzer: I think it's a great question. I think I would go back to the idea that our memories aren't very good. And even if they were really good, we would be too encumbered by a complete recollection of everything. So if I were to ask you questions like, "If you're staying in a hotel, during your stay, can you remember your room number," and you'd say, "Sure, I can." But if I were to ask you, "OK, think of the last 10 hotels you've been in. What were your room numbers?" And for most people, they're like, "I have no idea. After I check out, I put that in the delete folder and move on."
And I think the same is true for most of our experiences. How many airplane flights have you had? How many car rides have you had? Can you recall all of those experiences? And I think what happens is in our memories, we're just deleting most of the stuff, and quite frankly most of it's not very important. What song were you listening to two-thirds of the way into a road trip you took three years ago? It's not very important. And I think we use these heuristics to simplify memories in ways that are broadly useful, and I think the peak and the end might be reasonable places to focus on as we're trying to capture most of the experiences that we have.
Katy Milkman: That is a really nice and concise summary and makes a lot of sense to me. Could you tell us a little bit about your own recent research studying the peak-end effect in this very different context of volunteering?
Maurice Schweitzer: Sure. So with Polly Kang and David Daniels, we analyzed about two million text conversations that over 14,000 volunteers had for a crisis text line. And so here, people who are experiencing some sort of crisis or a crisis hotline, the text line allows them to text in and ask for help. We have five years of data and a lot of messages. People are texting in for a variety of crises. And what we did with our analysis is we categorized all different crises that people have, and there's a set of them that the volunteers characterize later. One type of crisis is particularly intense. The most intense crises are more draining, they're more effortful, they're far more difficult, the conversations are longer, and they're really far more likely to cause the counselors to quit. So we do see an effect for the intense difficulty of the very most difficult conversations.
Now what we did is we looked at both the peak, which we're characterizing this as streaks. So if there were several very difficult conversations in a row, people were more likely to quit. If there were two in a row, they're more likely to quit than if they're spread out. So if there's a relatively easier conversation, an extremely difficult one, that's a streak, and that streak. … And if we're ending on an extremely difficult conversation, that also makes quitting more likely. So we found that streaks of two intense, difficult conversations increased quitting by about 22%, but in our data, because people are randomly assigned, we have so many conversations over five years, we see people that have streaks of three, four, five, six, seven, all the way up to eight. People that have long streaks become about 100% more likely to quit. Quitting, in this case, is a significant problem. All of the counselors in this setting were trained. They had over 30 hours of training, but retaining them remains a significant challenge.
Katy Milkman: Yeah, I love this. And the implications for thinking about how do we schedule tasks or how do we assign work are just so clear and so important. It's a great study. What got you and your collaborators interested in revisiting this classic peak-end effect bias in this setting?
Maurice Schweitzer: Well, we were interested in thinking about the sequencing of tasks, and I've been, as you know, Katy, we've done work together in the past, I've been very interested in quitting; that is, what causes people to persist, and what causes people to quit? And in terms of motivation, there's some things we know. We know that paying people more money is good, giving people more autonomy is helpful, but for so many jobs, it's difficult to pull all these levers. And here, for some categories, like volunteers, nurses, teachers, call center employees, product managers, IT program managers, there's so many classes of people who turn over all the time, here we were interested to think about, are there relatively simple interventions? Can we understand what's driving this behavior where quitting remains a dominant characteristic of the workplace of so many organizations?
Katy Milkman: So stepping back from thinking about the organizational implications, I'm curious if in light of your research on the peak-end rule and also the research that's more classic by Kahneman and collaborators that we've talked about earlier in this conversation, are there things that you in your personal life or in your professional life do differently or would recommend that other people might do differently and that maybe our listeners could even think about doing differently as they make choices and assign tasks?
Maurice Schweitzer: Yeah, I think that's a great idea. So when we think about the errands that we're running, the conversations that we're having with colleagues, or just simply the tasks that we perform at work, to recognize that some of them are more draining and more intense than others, and when we end on a difficult note that's tougher for us and we do difficult things in sequence, it's more draining to us. So I think mixing things up, that's one clear implication we found from our data is that …
Katy Milkman: And ending on a high note, right, rather than a low note.
Maurice Schweitzer: Ending on a high note is great. And if we have a sequence of errands to run or a sequence of meetings to have, if we can just break it up, breaking it up can make a big difference. We did not measure mental health, but my guess is that it improves our well-being and happiness if we can just break things up, even if we have a lot of difficult tasks to do.
Katy Milkman: I love that. So we've got to think differently about sequencing and differently about conclusions because we have this subjective lens that we impose at the end of the day or at the end of an experience, and it's not just a pure integration of all those experiences. It's really those toughest, longest times and the endings that we recall. That's really helpful, Maurice.
I also want to ask a different couple of questions because part of the reason we wanted to do an episode about the peak-end effect this season is that this is one of the many really important findings Danny Kahneman left us with, and his recent passing I think gutted everyone in this field. Of course, he lived a long and productive life, and we're so happy that he did, and there've been many celebrations. But we've had him on the show repeatedly as a guest, and losing him in March was just devastating, I think probably to many of our listeners, certainly to us. Could you talk a little bit about what Danny's research contributions meant to you and how you'll remember him?
Maurice Schweitzer: Yeah, sure. He really was this incredible thinker, had so many generative insights, and yet I think remained incredibly modest throughout his life. He and Amos profoundly changed the way we think, where the ideas that were not fully rational have broad implications. I think they've had shockwaves throughout academia, impacting economics and finance, and of course, our area and marketing, it's so broad, but also for policy and I think organizational behavior that we've begun to understand how humans interact, and here we're talking about the peak-end rule and the streak-end rule, the way we might organize the work that we do in ways that can be very, very helpful.
Katy Milkman: I love that. And I really appreciate you taking the time to talk about your work and also to talk a little bit about Danny and his legacy. Thank you so much, Maurice. I'll wrap it there.
Maurice Schweitzer: Thank you.
Katy Milkman: Maurice Schweitzer is a friend and colleague of mine at the Wharton School where he's the Cecilia Yen Koo Professor of Operations, Information, and Decisions. He's also the author of a terrific book called Friend and Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both. You can find links to his research in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.
Danny Kahneman's insights have practical applications across a variety of fields, but the biases and heuristics that he explored can be especially pernicious in our financial lives. For tips on how to better approach important financial decisions—and to guard against the mental shortcuts that can lead to mistakes when it comes to money and investing—check out the Financial Decoder podcast. You can find it at schwab.com/FinancialDecoder or in your favorite podcast app.
While we've talked about the peak-end rule in this episode, we actually haven't told you about the most famous study on this topic. It was published by Danny Kahneman, Donald Redelmeier, and Joel Katz in 2003, and it involved an experiment with, of all things, colonoscopies. This study was done in the era when colonoscopies didn't involve full sedation, so patients could feel what was happening as a doctor put a scope up their backside to look for any signs of cancer in their colon. As you can probably imagine, this was quite uncomfortable, and the end of the procedure was typically particularly unpleasant.
Armed with knowledge of how peaks and ends distort our memory of experiences, Danny and his collaborators proposed and tested lengthening the very end of the colonoscopy by leaving the scope just barely in the patient for a bit longer than it needed to remain there, but in a way that wasn't very uncomfortable. So half of the patients in this study, about 300 people, had a typical colonoscopy, and the other half had a longer than usual colonoscopy with an extended ending, a kind of false ending of the procedure that involved minimal pain. The rest of the procedure was identical. Guess what happened? Patients who got the behaviorally informed bonus ending colonoscopy remembered it as less unpleasant, ranked the whole experience as less aversive, and were more likely to come back in five years for their next colonoscopy. It's pretty remarkable, right?
What I hope you'll remember, besides the fact that you should get your colonoscopy, is that the best or worst moment of an experience, whatever is the most extreme, is overweighted in hindsight, as is the last part. This can distort the way we remember our jobs, leading us to quit after negative peak experiences that could have been tolerated better if broken up. It can also distort the way we remember medical procedures or other uncomfortable experiences. And in this episode, we've argued it can even distort the way we remember famous people, leading us to focus on the peak and end of their lives. This bias can be harmful to our persistence and health, but once we understand it, as Danny did, it can become an asset because it teaches us how to construct our days, our vacations, our jobs, and our medical procedures to improve the way they're remembered. By deliberately breaking up negative experiences and ending on a high note, you can change the way you look back on things for the better.
So keep this in mind the next time you're scheduling a day of meetings or a vacation. My hope is that this insight will make your life a little better. And like so many of the insights we bring you on the show, that's thanks to research by the late great Danny Kahneman, who we're so lucky to have had on this earth. We're all tremendously grateful to you, Danny.
You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, a rating on Spotify, or feedback wherever you listen. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app. And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book, How to Change, or sign up for my monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers, on Substack.
I'm Dr. Katy Milkman. Talk to you soon.
Speaker 7: For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/podcast.
