Cognitive Biases: Peak-End Effect

In this video, Laurie Santos (Yale University) explains why our memories of good and bad events are a biased. Specifically, she explains how our retrospective evaluations fall prey to the peak-end effect— a bias in which we overweight the peak and end of our everyday experiences— and how this bias leads us to ignore other features of the event like its duration.

Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology, and Head of Silliman College | Host of The Happiness Lab podcast at Yale University

Our research explores an age-old question: what makes the human mind unique? We test this question by studying the cognitive capacities of non-human animals. By comparing the cognitive abilities of non-human animals to those of humans, we can determine which domains of knowledge are unique to the human mind. At the Canine and Primate Laboratory (aka CapLab), we study the origins of human cognition by focusing on two different groups of non-human animals.

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