Olalla
Checking in and the Peak-End Rule
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Dear Bolu,
Happy New Month!
I hope this finds you well. If it doesn’t, I hope, at the very least, that it sets you on the path to being well. I hope you’re on track to achieving the goals you set for yourself this year. If you aren’t, well, you’re not alone. Today is another first, and I hope you can find, in that fact, a potion to renew your motivation, a prompt to change your strategy, and a push to get back on your feet. I don’t have much to say today because perhaps there’s not enough abundance in my heart, but I will share a tiny thought that I hope you find helpful.
Recently I finished reading Olalla, one of Robert Louis Stevenson’s short stories. It’s a narrative about a sick soldier who falls in love with a lady who’s supposedly from a family of vampires. I enjoyed reading it till I got to what seemed to me a very dissatisfying conclusion. I can't say for sure whether I was disappointed because the story ended too quickly, it wasn’t the ending I desired, or Stevenson just made a hash of it. I didn’t like the end, and that much was certain. In assessing the book, I was tempted to give it a relatively poor rating, but I caught myself when I remembered a concept I came upon a few years ago. It’s called the peak-end rule, and Daniel Kahneman writes about it in his book, Thinking, Fast and Slow.
The rule says that when assessing the quality of any experience, we ascribe more weight to our feelings at the peak of the experience and its end. Here’s how BigIdeasGrowingMinds put it;
“The peak-end rule is a mental shortcut in which people judge an experience largely based on how they felt at its peak (i.e. the most intense point) & its end, rather than based on the total sum or average of every moment of the experience.”
Our brain can only remember so much, choosing to remember these two points (peak and end) best. And it is these points we remember that inform our overall evaluation of any experience. Say a movie is divided into ten parts, and you felt that nine of those parts deserved a rating of 6, but the outstanding part deserved a 9. You’d expect the overall rating to be much closer to 6, but usually, that doesn’t happen. Such experiences would score at least 7, but the math says it should be 6.3. Similarly, say every part deserved a 6, but the ending was so bad it deserved a 3. You’d still expect the overall rating to be much closer to 6, but no, it probably won’t be. The math says it should be 5.7, but 5 will likely be our highest score.
The peak, end, and, dare I say, the trough of an experience bear largely on our assessment of the said experience. We should be aware of this when making judgements from memory and be careful to develop fairer and more balanced assessments. So, maybe you had a rather good childhood, and that one time when your dad cussed at you doesn’t make him a villainous parent. Maybe that relationship you’re thinking of rekindling was, in fact, terrible, and the 15 days fun-filled vacation in the Maldives doesn’t make it any less terrible. Maybe your former boss was genuinely awesome, and that awful day he disregarded your opinion in a team meeting doesn’t make him any less awesome. Maybe your student did great on that research project, and a poor final presentation shouldn’t take too much away from the praise she merits. Maybe, dear friend, Olalla is a wonderful story, and the dissatisfying end doesn’t detract from the wonder. Maybe.
Fin.
P.S.
This one is a nod to Blanco White’s Olalla, which you can listen to on Spotify or YouTube.
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Write you soon, merci!
- Wolemercy
This is really good.
This is one of the best piece I’ve read. There’s so much to take from it. Well done!!