A Tale of Two Selves

Few books have made me question reality, perception, and myself as much as Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, psychologist, founder of behavioral economics, Nobel Prize laureate, and one of the most influential psychologists and economists in the world.

The book summarizes decades of Kahneman's research. It is not a light read, but it does an exceptional job at making cognitive psychology and behavioral economics accessible, and it is definitely one of the most enlightening (albeit slightly disconcerting - for reasons I will discuss later) books I have read.

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As an Economics major, I sometimes questioned the assumptions made by much of the standard economic theory. The more advanced my classes got, the more unrealistic the assumptions of these theories and models seemed to become. A central tenet of the standard economic theory is that humans are always capable of making rational decisions. But is this true? Research conducted by Kahneman and many other eminent psychologists and economists (and, if we think about all the irrational stuff we usually do, just common sense) has demonstrated it is not.

Not only are humans not rational, we also do not always perceive reality (even our own internal reality) as it truly is. Throughout the book, Kahneman covers so much material and offers so much evidence that, for anyone truly interested in the subject, the best option is to read the book. In this post, I am going to focus on one of the theories that blew my mind when I first learned about it (actually not through Kahneman but through journalist Robert Wright): the one continuous self we usually experience (the little voice in our heads that seems to be narrating our reality) is not our only "self".

Daniel Kahneman

Two Selves

Humans have two "selves" (some claim the number is actually higher): an experiencing self, that experiences each moment, and a remembering self that remembers, keeps score and maintains records.

We live life through the experiencing self, but each moment is so fleeting, our perspective is usually that of the remembering self. That means when you think about what you did, say, two hours ago, what really matters is not the actual experience (lived by the experiencing self) but the memory of the experience (what the remembering self made of it). Studies show there is actually a huge difference between the two.

The Cold Water Experiment

A seminal research by Kahneman in 1993 demonstrated that the conflict between the experiencing and the remembering selves can end up in poor decision-making. The strictly controlled and randomized study consisted of three parts:

1. Submerging a hand in cold water (14° C) for 60 seconds.

2. Submerging a hand in cold water (14° C) for 60 seconds, then keeping it submerged for an additional 30 seconds in slightly less cold water (15° C).

3. Repeating one of the two experiences, letting the participants pick whichever one they prefer.

It is important to note that in the actual experiment the order in which the subjects experienced option one and option two was randomized. I am just calling them option one and option two here for simplicity. Additionally, Kahneman explained the temperature was chosen at 14 and 15 degrees because it provided the "right" amount of pain: painful enough to be uncomfortable, but not unbearably painful.

If you think about it logically, option one makes the most sense. Option two offers the same pain as option one and then an additional 30 seconds of more pain. Rational humans would pick option one without thinking twice. But humans are not rational, and nearly 70% of the participants chose to repeat option two. Why?

The Peak-End Rule

The remembering self is biased and inaccurate. We do not remember full experiences. Instead, our memories are tremendously biased by the peaks (the intense highs and lows) and the end. In the case of the cold water experiment, the experiencing self suffered less with option one, but the remembering self remembered it differently: while option one offered an increasing discomfort as time passed due to the cold water, in option two, there was the same level of increasing pain at first, but then things got better and the discomfort decreased. The "better" ending (which was not really better because it was still painful) convinced most of the participants that option two was the way to go.

Participants additionally claimed that the second option was less painful, less cold, and easier to endure. They also seemed to completely ignore the length of each experience (and some even remembered option two as being shorter). Kahneman defines the Peak-End rule as follows:

"The peak-end rule is a psychological heuristic in which people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e. its most intense point) and at its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience."

Kahneman conducted more experiments but the results did not change: the experiencing and the remembering self are sometimes at odds with each other, and when choosing between the two, we tend to side with our remembering self.

What Does This All Mean?

These findings can lead to a never-ending stream of questions: how come there are two selves when I have lived my whole life convinced there is just one? Which of them is my "true" self? Do I even have a single true self? This also creates a dilemma for physicians and policy-makers: should they design procedures and policies based on people's actual experiences or on people's future memories of those experiences (which they will be judged by)?

A more philosophical take can make us question our entire life experience. Further experiments by Kahneman showed that people claimed to be happy when (at least according to the experiencing self) they really weren't, remembered experiences as being better or worse than they truly were, and, in general, were full of misconceptions and biases.

Science offers no definitive answer. The more I dug on the topic, the more questions I had about everything, but learning about my own biases, as unsettling as it has been, has allowed me to be better-prepared to deal with them and to at least try to avoid making irrational decisions.