Peak-end rule

What it is

Judging an experience mostly by its most intense moment and how it ended, not by its total or average.

Related

• Framing effect bias
  How an experience ends frames our whole memory of it.
• Primacy and recency effects bias
  Both say that the shape of an experience in memory depends on where things fall, not on the whole.
• Rosy retrospection bias
  We remember the peaks and the end, which are often the best parts.

References

• Wikipedia: Peak-end rule en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: List of cognitive biases en.wikipedia.org
• Wikipedia: Cognitive bias codex en.wikipedia.org

More in “Memory: what we keep and how we rewrite it”