The Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self

There are two selves inside every person making a decision, and they almost never agree. The experiencing self lives in the present moment: it registers a continuous stream of pleasure, discomfort, engagement, fatigue, and flow as events unfold. The remembering self constructs narratives about the past, evaluating them by a rule that ignores duration and attends almost entirely to the peak intensity of the experience and how it ended—what Kahneman called the peak-end rule. In his cold-water experiment, participants who endured ninety seconds of painful cold preferred to repeat that session over one of sixty seconds of equally painful cold, because the ninety-second session ended at a slightly warmer temperature. The extra thirty seconds of pain were not merely ignored; they improved the remembered experience. The experiencing self had been wrong about which session to avoid; the remembering self had been wrong about the past. Both were operating correctly by