What we remember from a conversation
Here’s a question: how do we know if a presentation, a job interview or a
date went well?
We usually have a good hunch – but do we really know? Assessing a
date would involve some pretty complicated number crunching: we’d have
to calculate how we felt, how the other person felt, what we had expected
and so on. An impossible task.
It turns out our mind solves this problem by using a surprisingly simple
strategy, as Laurie Santos from Yale University explains brilliantly in a
lecture: when we remember something we ignore most of it. Actually we
make an assessment based only on two parts of the experience:
- The peak – i.e. the part of the experience that was most extreme (either
pleasant or unpleasant).- The end – i.e. whether it got better or worse at the end. (This is
important: even a small improvement can make the date seem like an
OK experience, whereas a poor ending will ruin an otherwise great
evening).This is the Peak–End Rule, devised in a 1993 study by the Nobel laureate
Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues.
How can we use this in our life?
The Peak–End Rule gives us some hints about how to make an experience
special:
We often obsess about what kind of first impression we make on people,
fearing that people might judge us based only on our outward appearance
or first sentences. This thinking is based on the famous notion of ‘You
only have one chance to make a first impression.’ Though this holds true –
the first thing we hear about someone influences our judgement of that
person, the first price we are quoted forms the basis for the negotiation; it
is the anchor effect – maybe we should start obsessing about something
else: there might be only one chance to make a lasting impression. That
lasting impression is not necessarily the first impression, but rather the