Week 11 Session: The Remembered Wait

Week 11. The wait you report is not the wait you had, and the last minute decides how the whole thing is remembered.

10 May 2027

Everything you have measured this semester was the experienced wait. This week introduces the other one, and the two do not agree.

Redelmeier and Kahneman recorded pain in real time through colonoscopy and lithotripsy and compared it with what patients said afterwards. Remembered discomfort tracked the peak and the last few minutes. Procedure length barely showed up. The 1993 cold water study makes the same point more sharply: people offered a repeat chose the longer trial, which was 60 seconds of cold plus 30 seconds of slightly less cold, over the shorter one.

The design consequence is immediate and slightly unpleasant. You can improve a remembered wait by extending it, provided the extension is the gentlest part. Decide this week whether you are willing to do that.

This is also the week to read the marks policy, which holds results until week 12. That delay is designed, it is ours, and it is on the syllabus so that you can argue with it while the reading is in front of you.

In the workshop#

Take a wait you have already documented and change only its final ten per cent. Same total duration, same information, different ending. Then say what you would have to measure to know whether it worked, and which of those measurements the person waiting would consent to.

But wait, there’s more#

The prompt that asks you to stay on the line for a short survey arrives at the one moment the peak-end rule says matters most. It is placed after the resolution and before the hang up, which is the last thing you will remember about the call. Whether that placement is a measurement or an intervention is not obvious, and that is the interesting part.