If you were happy and you know it,clap your hands! Testing the peak-end rule for retrospective judgments of well-being in everyday life

Abstract

The experience sampling method (ESM) and comparable assessment approaches are increasingly becoming popular tools for well-being research. In part, they are so popular because they represent more direct approaches for assessing individuals’ experienced well-being during a specified period, whereas one-time, retrospective evaluations of that episode are believed to introduce systematic biases. Along these lines, the peak-end rule states that the most extreme and recent sensations of an episode disproportionally influence retrospective well-being judgments. However, it has yet to be determined whether such systematic effects found in experimental laboratory studies generalize to retrospective judgments of well-being in everyday life as captured in ESM studies. Across four ESM samples (overall N = 1,889, total measurements = 131,575), we found that retrospective well-being judgments were disproportionately influenced by the peak and end experiences from the assessment period. However, these effects depended on the item framing of the retrospective judgment (global vs. more specific framings) and broad versus narrow conceptualizations of peaks and ends (states, days, and weeks), pointing toward potential ways to mitigate peak/end effects. Our findings emphasize the importance of differentiating between momentary and retrospective well-being assessments and selecting an appropriate measurement approach on the basis of these conceptual considerations.

Plain language summary

In psychology, there is a prevailing notion that each of us has two distinct selves: our experiencing self and our remembering self. While the former reflects our actual perceptions, emotions, and behaviors in the moment, the latter reflects our memories of these perceptions, emotions, and behaviors in hindsight. Crucially, these two aspects of our self do not always align perfectly, but there are systematic discrepancies between the two. For example, the peak-end rule asserts that when individuals recall their past experiences, they primarily rely on the peak (i.e., the best or worst moment) and the end (i.e., the last moment) of those experiences. The peak-end rule has been demonstrated primarily in the laboratory, but evidence has been mixed as to whether it also holds in everyday life, that is, whether evaluations of our past well-being are disproportionally influenced by peak and end experiences. In this study, we show that our peak and end experiences in a given episode can have a disproportionate influence on how happy we think we were. However, we also show that the extent of this influence depends on how we ask people to recall their well-being (e.g., whether we ask them to evaluate their well-being in general versus whether we ask them to refer to specific moments) and on how broadly we frame peaks and ends (e.g., peak/end weeks have stronger influences than specific peak/end moments). Overall, our study underscores that our memories of how happy we were do not always resemble how happy we actually were and that the degree of such deviations depends on the framing of the remembering self. Psychologists should keep that in mind when assessing well-being.