When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing

by Daniel H. Pink

When researchers have studied scenarios like these, they’ve uncovered something strange. People tend to rate lives like the first scenario (a short life that ends on an upswing) more highly than those like the second (a longer life that ends on a downswing). Considered in purely utilitarian terms, this conclusion is bizarre. After all, in the hypothetical, Jimmy lives thirty years longer! And those extra years aren’t choked with misery; they’re simply less spectacular than the early ones. The cumulative amount of positivity of that longer life (which still includes those early years as a star) is indisputably higher. “The suggestion that adding mildly pleasant years to a very positive life does not enhance, but decreases, perceptions of the quality of life is counterintuitive,” write social scientists Ed Diener, Derrick Wirtz, and Shigehiro Oishi. “We label this the James Dean Effect because a life that is short but intensely exciting, such as the storied life led by the actor James Dean, is seen as most positive.”15 The James Dean effect is another example of how endings alter our perception. They help us encode—that is, to evaluate and record—entire experiences. You might have heard of the “peak-end rule.” Formulated in the early 1990s by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues including Don Redelmeier and Barbara Fredrickson, who studied patient experiences during colonoscopies and other unpleasant experiences, the rule says that when we remember an event we assign the greatest ...