Charles Schreiber
Charles Schreiber is the third author on Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber and Redelmeier (1993), the cold-water study in Psychological Science titled "When more pain is preferred to less: adding a better end". It is the cleanest demonstration in this literature that a person's preference can contradict their own experience.
Who they are
The design is worth setting out, because it is short and it is decisive. One hand went into water at fourteen degrees for sixty seconds. The other hand had the same sixty seconds, then a further thirty seconds while the temperature was raised slightly, still cold but less so. Asked which trial they would rather repeat, most people chose the longer one, which contained strictly more discomfort.
The technical name for this procedure is the cold pressor task, which is simply holding a hand in cold water while rating how it feels.
Nothing beyond his authorship on this paper has been verified in this vault. No affiliation is recorded, because none has been checked.
Key papers
Kahneman, D., Fredrickson, B. L., Schreiber, C. A., & Redelmeier, D. A. (1993). "When more pain is preferred to less: adding a better end", Psychological Science, 4(6), 401 to 405. Third author.
Key ideas
A worse total can be the preferred memory. Adding discomfort to the end of an episode, provided the added part is milder, made people choose to repeat it. That is the sharpest version of the gap between living through something and remembering it, which is carried at The Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self.
This study is legitimately Daniel Kahneman's, and the founding duration-neglect paper is not. That one is Barbara Fredrickson's, published the same year. The two are often merged.
One widely quoted number is not printed on this site. The figure often given for the proportion who chose the longer trial has not been checked against the original paper, and it is left out until it has been.
Concepts on this site
The Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self
Sources
- Kahneman, D., Fredrickson, B. L., Schreiber, C. A., & Redelmeier, D. A. (1993). Psychological Science, 4(6), 401 to 405.
- Vault research and verification pass, 2026-09-11. Nothing beyond authorship established; the often-quoted proportion remains unchecked and unprinted.