the experiencing vs. remembering selves

Daniel Kahneman has popularized the distinction between “the experiencing self” and “the remembering self”. The experiencing self exists only in the present moment operates on raw sensory input, while the remembering self exists in retrospect and operates on memory. We selves feel like both of them, but we identify overwhelmingly with the remembering self, leading to a number of quirks in our consciousness.

When remembering an experience, we weight the end more heavily

A surprising result is that we tend to judge an overall experience more positively if it ends well, even if involves more pain or discomfort than the comparable experience. For example, this experiment shows that if you extend the duration of someone’s colonoscopy but make it less painful near the end, they’ll tend to rate the overall experience as less painful than if you end the colonoscopy as soon as possible, even though in the “less painful” case the patient experiences more pain in total.

We might also do this proactively…

A surprising finding in this paper, “The Hedonics of Debt”, which mirrors the above is that people will choose loans that cost them more money in total if they end with smaller payments:

in Experiments 3 and 4, we show that participants increased their willingness to buy if loans were made longer and more expensive by adding smaller, less “painful” payments to the end. But it might not be that weird a finding since it’s also how we treat pain.

So our psychological response to debt is similar to that of physical pain. I wonder if our responses light up the same regions in the brain.