Duration neglect in retrospective evaluations of affective episodes
Fredrickson and Kahneman established duration neglect. Participants watched pleasant and unpleasant film clips that varied in both length and intensity, rating how they felt moment by moment during each and then judging each clip as a whole once it ended. How long a clip lasted had almost no effect on the overall judgment. What predicted the judgment was a weighted average of moments, as though the experience had been sampled rather than summed. A second experiment had people rank the clips by how much they contributed to an overall sense of pleasantness, comparing those who ranked from memory with those told about the task in advance and encouraged to evaluate as they went. Duration mattered even less when judging from memory. The implication that runs through this vault is that the remembered value of an experience is not the total of what happened in it, so time spent is close to invisible in hindsight.
Fredrickson and Kahneman established duration neglect. Participants watched pleasant and unpleasant film clips that varied in both length and intensity, rating how they felt moment by moment during each and then judging each clip as a whole once it ended. How long a clip lasted had almost no effect on the overall judgment. What predicted the judgment was a weighted average of moments, as though the experience had been sampled rather than summed. A second experiment had people rank the clips by how much they contributed to an overall sense of pleasantness, comparing those who ranked from memory with those told about the task in advance and encouraged to evaluate as they went. Duration mattered even less when judging from memory. The implication that runs through this vault is that the remembered value of an experience is not the total of what happened in it, so time spent is close to invisible in hindsight.
Written from the abstract, OpenAlex.
What our sources record
Reproduced as it was written when this source was checked, figures and all.
PubMed 8355141. Study 1, 32 participants; study 2, 96 participants. First author Fredrickson.
Where we use it
- Why You Remember the End of a Holiday and Not the Middle, Why We Come Back
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The link below was matched against the publisher's record on title, first author and year, and all three agree.
The source
https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.65.1.45
DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.65.1.45