Lived versus remembered experience

Experiences and memories of experiences are two different things, and Kahneman makes a useful distinction between what he calls the ‘lived’ and the ‘remembered’ experience. Kahneman realised that these two experiences could differ greatly when comparing the amount of pain people reported during a colonoscopy (subjects were asked to quantify their pain every sixty seconds while they were undergoing the procedure) to the same subjects’ retrospective reports of this experience. Some individuals went to the extent of reporting as ‘preferred’ experiences where they had actually experienced the most suffering (Redelmeier & Kahneman, 1996). Kahneman replicated his research in other areas, with a particular interest in pleasure and pain, interest and boredom, joy and sorrow, and satisfaction and dissatisfaction, and always found that there were systematic inconsistencies between people’s experiences and their accounts of such experiences (Kahneman, 1999).

These findings led Kahneman to propose the existence of two different ‘selves’ – the ‘experiencing self’, which simply lives its life in the present, on a moment-to-moment basis, and the ‘remembering self’, which meaningfully reconstructs these moments. He states that the ‘experiencing self’ psychological present may last up to three seconds, suggesting that people experience some 20,000 moments in a waking day. Hence, the ‘experiencing self’ has barely the time to exist while, on the other hand, the

‘remembering self’ does not keep track of every lived moment (Kahneman & Riis, 2005).

It seems that the ‘remembering self’ has a complete or nearly complete neglect of the duration of experiences and appears to work on a Peak-End rule (only retaining the most salient moments of an experience and the way in which such an experience ends). The relevance that the ‘remembering self’ confers on these specific moments appears to be the first element of distortion in the memory of the whole experience. According to Kahneman, this Peak-End rule explains why, when a negative event occurs at the very

end of an experience, the negative quality of its ending affects the remembrance of the whole experience. No matter how long the positive experience that preceded the event lasted, these good moments which actually formed part of the subject’s ‘lived’

experience seem to just disappear from his or her memory (Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber & Redelmeier, 1993).

Another factor of distortion is that memory is highly subjective. Memory does not preserve experiences as they really happen, but reconstructs experiences according to the distinctive criteria used by the person to evaluate events. Kahneman & Riis argue:

When we are asked ‘how good was the vacation?’, it is not an ‘experiencing self’ that answers, but a ‘remembering and evaluating self’, the self that keeps score and maintains records. Unlike the ‘experiencing self’, the ‘remembering self’ is relatively stable and permanent. Memories are what we get to keep from our experience, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the ‘remembering self’ (2005: 285).

Kahneman’s research presents evidence that questions the validity of memory-based reports, as he found that memories of experiences were not entirely reliable, and that certain cognitive distortions occurred in a systematic way. Kahneman (2000) suggests that memory-based reports are retrospective global assessments that tell us more about the outcomes of experiences that people valued over time than about the pleasure and pain they actually experienced in the past. He claims that the ‘remembering self’ works as a storyteller, and suggests that these are the stories people tell themselves about their experiences that preserve such experiences into their long-term memory (Kahneman, 2010).

In agreement with Kahneman, other theorists claim that self-reports of experiences are frequently biased. For instance, some argue that people’s memories are often altered, distorted, or fabricated in order to preserve personal coherence and integrate self- beliefs, self-images and goals (Conway, 2005; McAdams, 2001). Others have found that an individual’s memory of his/her own emotions are partially reconstructed on the basis of current feelings about, and appraisals of, past events (Levine & Safer, 2002). Still others state that additionally, self-report of emotional experiences may be biased by the difficulty of becoming aware of and explaining one’s emotional experiences. For

instance, repressive mechanisms may be at work in biasing self-reports. Steptoe points to this risk in relation to performance anxiety research: ‘people may not be accurate or truthful in their subjective ratings of anxiety. The under-reporting of subjective distress is thought to be part of the ‘repressive’ style of coping with stress, and some people may not even acknowledge their fears privately to themselves’ (1989:4).

Another possible bias of self-reports of emotional experiences is that people are seldom aware of the causes of their own emotions. Asking subjects ‘why’ they felt a particular emotion could be asking for information that they cannot consciously access (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003). As Frijda argues: ‘One knows, generally, that one has an emotion: one does not always know why, and what exactly makes one have it; and if one does know, it is a construction, a hypothesis, like those one makes about the emotion of someone else’ (Frijda, 1986: 464).

In summary, individuals’ self-reports may be viewed as unreliable tools to accessing their actual emotional experiences (to accessing the experience of the ‘experiencing self’). For instance, when a performer reports ‘joy’ in his or her last performance, it is impossible to know exactly when and to what extent he or she actually experienced such emotion.