When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(38)

However, as with Clark Hull’s rats, being able to sniff the finish line—whether it offers a hunk of cheese or a slice of meaning—can invigorate us to move faster.

Red Hong Yi, now thirty-one, continues to run for exercise, although she hasn’t attempted a second marathon or even contemplated running one in the next few years. “Maybe I can do it on my thirty-ninth birthday,” she says.


ENCODE: JIMMY, JIM, AND THE GOOD LIFE

On February 8, 1931, Mildred Marie Wilson of Marion, Indiana, gave birth to what would be her only child, a baby boy that she and her husband named James and called Jimmy. Jimmy enjoyed a happy, if tumultuous, childhood. His family moved from northern Indiana to Southern California when he began elementary school. But a few years later, his mother died suddenly of cancer—and Jimmy’s bereft father sent him back to Indiana to live with relatives. The rest of his young life was pleasant and steady in a midwestern way—church, sports teams, debate club. When he graduated high school, he moved back to Southern California for college, where he caught the movie bug, and in 1951, just shy of turning twenty, he dropped out of UCLA to pursue an acting career.

Then this ordinary story took an extraordinary turn.

Jimmy quickly landed a few commercials and minor television roles. And the year he turned twenty-three, one of the era’s most famous directors cast him in the film adaptation of a John Steinbeck novel. The movie became a hit; Jimmy was nominated for an Oscar. That same year, he landed the lead role in an even more prominent movie; it earned him another Oscar nomination. In a blink, at an impossibly young age, he became an impossibly huge Hollywood star. Then, about four months shy of his twenty-fifth birthday, Jimmy, whose full name was James Byron Dean, died in an auto accident.

Stop for a moment and ponder this question: Taking Jimmy’s life as a whole, how desirable do you think it was? On a 1-to-9 scale, with 1 being the most undesirable life and 9 being the most desirable life, what number would you assign?

Now consider a hypothetical. Imagine that Jimmy had lived a few more decades but that he never achieved the professional success of his early twenties. He didn’t spiral into homelessness or drug addiction. His career didn’t implode. His star just fell from its empyrean heights. Maybe he did a TV sitcom or two and won a few smaller parts in less successful films before he died, say, in his midfifties. How would you rate his life now?

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 weight to its most intense moment (the peak) and how it culminates (the end).16 So a shorter colonoscopy in which the final moments are painful is remembered as being worse than a longer colonoscopy that happens to end less unpleasantly even if the latter procedure delivers substantially more total pain.17 We downplay how long an episode lasts—Kahneman calls it “duration neglect”—and magnify what happens at the end.18

The encoding power of endings shapes many of our opinions and subsequent decisions. For instance, several studies show that we often evaluate the quality of meals, movies, and vacations not by the full experience but by certain moments, especially the end.19 So when we share our evaluations with others—in conversations or in a TripAdvisor review—much of what we’re conveying is our reaction to the conclusion. (Look at Yelp reviews of restaurants, for example, and notice how many of the reviews describe how the meal ended—an unexpected farewell treat, a check with an error, a server chasing after diners to return an item left behind.) Endings also affect more consequential choices. For example, when Americans vote for president, they tell pollsters they intend to decide based on the full four years of an expiring presidential term. But research shows voters decide based on the election year economy—the culmination of a four-year sequence, not its totality. This “end heuristic,” political scientists argue, leads to “myopic voting” and, perhaps as a result, myopic policies.20

The encoding effects of endings are especially strong when it comes to our idea of what constitutes a moral life. Three Yale researchers set up an experiment using different versions of a short biography of a fictitious character they called Jim. In all the versions, Jim was the CEO of a company, but the researchers varied the trajectories of Jim’s life. In some cases, he was a nasty guy who underpaid his employees, denied them health care benefits, and never gave to charities—behavior that lasted for three decades. But late in his career, close to retirement, he turned generous. He raised pay, shared profits, and “started donating large amounts of money to various charities around the community”—only to die suddenly of a surprise heart attack six months after he turned benevolent. In other scenarios, Jim moved in the opposite direction. For several decades, he was a kind and generous CEO—“putting the wellbeing of his employees ahead of his own financial interests” and donating large sums to local charities. But as he neared retirement, he “dramatically altered his behavior.” He cut salaries, began taking most of the profits for himself, and ceased his charitable giving—only to die suddenly of a surprise heart attack six months later.21