How the sense of an ending shapes memory

Kahneman's book, Thinking Fast and Slow[0] is a great read if you like to think about memory and how thinking functions in practice

[0] - https://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp...

This can be an interesting thing to be aware of and play with. Taking his example of pain - if you know that your reported perception of pain will be down to your own judgment and where it sits within your narrative, you can start to play with the narrative, lie to yourself, alter your response.

A simple example is in physicality. Suppose you're rowing a 2km race. You break it into eight 250m chunks in your head, because a 250m sprint is am easy thing, and aa long as you knowingly don't know that there's more pain coming, you treat each sprint entirely independently, and squeeze that much more out of yourself.

A slightly more complex example is in flat-out rewriting, where you consciously choose to either interpret or reinterpret an event in a light you convince yourself to be true. Years later all you remember is your new truth.

I mean, people do the latter inadvertently and crappily all the time, as he describes. Why not do it deliberately? I quite like being in charge of my narrative, even if I cheat with tippex and autoindoctrination.

Sure, you end up forgetting which reality is really real, but again, it doesn't really matter - narrative reality is entirely subjective anyway.

I often have to pass on bad news in my job. For example, if we realize that there is a problem and estimates need to be pushed. Or if I'm mentoring someone, sometimes I have to adjust their perception of their performance. In many cases I've tried to lead in with casual conversation, then break the bad news. This seems to work very poorly. Instead it is better to lead in with the bad news, deal with the fallout and then finish on an up note. I've never really understood why this order is more effective, but it makes sense to me now. Very interesting.

It makes a lot of sense that the ending affects the entire experience. We tend to implicitly assume that things will proceed as they have in the past, following a trajectory. So, to use the Formula One example, since he started strong and finished weak, it's perfectly reasonable to believe that if there were more races, he would have continued to do badly and lose the championship. But if he had started weak and finished strong, then it's an easy assumption that if there were more races he would have continued to do well.

Remember when restaurants used to serve a chocolate mint with your bill? Andes Candies kept the restaurant industry afloat.

If you want to learn more about this, Google for "primary and recency effect," or look for serial position effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_position_effect