Simon Kemp
Simon Kemp is a psychologist and the first author, with Christopher Burt and Laura Furneaux, of the only direct test of the peak-end rule on an actual holiday. Forty-nine students going away for about a week sent in a daily text message rating how happy they were, and were asked afterwards how good the trip had been. The result did not behave the way the rule says it should, and the most interesting finding in the paper is the one nobody quotes.
Who they are
The peak-end rule is the claim that what people remember of an experience is set mostly by its most intense moment and by how it ended, with the length of the thing barely counting. It comes from short laboratory episodes, and the obvious question is whether it survives contact with something that lasts a week.
The vault records no current post for him, and none is claimed here.
Key papers
Kemp, S., Burt, C. D. B., & Furneaux, L. (2008). "A test of the peak-end rule with extended autobiographical events", Memory and Cognition, 36(1), 132 to 138. First author. Forty-nine students, holidays averaging seven days, happiness rated daily by text message.
Key ideas
Four results, and they do not all point the same way. The average level of happiness across the whole trip predicted how good people said it had been. The ending predicted it more strongly than the peak did, so the two halves of the rule did not behave alike. The length of the holiday made no difference, so that part of the story held. And the participants could not recall their own day-to-day changes in happiness at all.
That last one changes the story rather than qualifying it. The middle of a holiday is not outvoted by the peak and the ending. It is not available to be voted on.
Forty-nine students, self-reported by text message, one study. It is small. It is also the closest thing to a direct test that exists, which says something about the state of the evidence behind a very confidently repeated claim.
Concepts on this site
Sources
- Kemp, S., Burt, C. D. B., & Furneaux, L. (2008). Memory and Cognition, 36(1), 132 to 138.
- Research and verification pass, 2026-09-11. No current affiliation verified.