When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(40)

When time is constrained and limited, as it is in act three, we attune to the now. We pursue different goals—emotional satisfaction, an appreciation for life, a sense of meaning. And these updated goals make people “highly selective in their choice of social partners” and prompt them to “systematically hone their social networks.” We edit our relationships. We omit needless people. We choose to spend our remaining years with networks that are small, tight, and populated with those who satisfy higher needs.26

Moreover, what spurs editing isn’t aging per se, Carstensen found, but endings of any sort. For example, when she compared college seniors with new college students, students in their final year displayed the same kind of social-network pruning as their seventy-something grandparents. When people are about to switch jobs or move to a new city, they edit their immediate social networks because their time in that setting is ending. Even political transitions have this effect. In a study of people in Hong Kong four months before the territory’s handover from Great Britain to the People’s Republic of China in 1997, both young people and older folks narrowed their circles of friends.

Just as intriguing, the converse is also true: Expanding people’s time horizons arrests their editing behavior. Carstensen conducted an experiment in which she asked people to “imagine that they had just received a telephone call from their physician, who had informed them of a new medical breakthrough that would likely add 20 years to their life.” Under these conditions, older people were no more likely than younger ones to prune their social networks.27

Yet, when endings become salient—whenever we enter an act three of any kind—we sharpen our existential red pencils and scratch out anyone or anything nonessential. Well before the curtain falls, we edit.


ELEVATE: GOOD NEWS, BAD NEWS, AND HAPPY ENDINGS

“I’ve got some good news and some bad news.”

You’ve undoubtedly said that before. Whether you’re a parent, a teacher, a doctor, or a writer trying to explain a missed deadline, you had to deliver information—some of it positive, some of it not—and opened with this two-headed approach.

But which piece of information should you introduce first? Should the good news precede the bad? Or should the happy follow the sad?

As someone who finds himself delivering mixed news more often than he should or wants to, I’ve always led with the positive. My instinct has been to spread a downy duvet of good feeling to cushion the coming hammerblow.

My instinct, alas, has been dead wrong.

To understand why, let’s switch perspectives—from me to you. Suppose you’re on the receiving end of my mixed news, and after my “I’ve got some good news and some bad news” windup, I append a question: “Which would you like to hear first?”

Think about that for a moment.

Chances are, you opted to hear the bad news first. Several studies over several decades have found that roughly four out of five people “prefer to begin with a loss or negative outcome and ultimately end with a gain or positive outcome, rather than the reverse.”28 Our preference, whether we’re a patient getting test results or a student awaiting a midsemester evaluation, is clear: bad news first, good news last.

But as news givers, we often do the reverse. Delivering that harsh performance review feels unsettling, so we prefer to ease into it, to demonstrate our kind intentions and caring nature by offering a few spoonfuls of sugar before administering the bitter medicine. Sure, we know that we like to hear the bad news first. But somehow we don’t understand that the person sitting across the desk, wincing at our two-headed intro, feels the same. She’d rather get the grimness out of the way and end the encounter on a more redeeming note. As two of the researchers who’ve studied this issue say, “Our findings suggest that the doctors, teachers, and partners . . . might do a poor job of giving good and bad news because they forget for a moment how they want to hear news when they are patients, students, and spouses.”29

We blunder—I blunder—because we fail to understand the final principle of endings: Given a choice, human beings prefer endings that elevate. The science of timing has found—repeatedly—what seems to be an innate preference for happy endings.30 We favor sequences of events that rise rather than fall, that improve rather than deteriorate, that lift us up rather than bring us down. And simply knowing this inclination can help us understand our own behavior and improve our interactions with others.

For example, social psychologists Ed O’Brien and Phoebe Ellsworth of the University of Michigan wanted to see how endings shaped people’s judgment. So they packed a bag full of Hershey’s Kisses and headed to a busy area of the Ann Arbor campus. They set up a table and told students they were conducting a taste test of some new varieties of Kisses that contained local ingredients.

People sidled up to the table, and a research assistant, who didn’t know what O’Brien and Ellsworth were measuring, pulled a chocolate out of the bag and asked a participant to taste it and rate it on a 0-to-10 scale.

Then the research assistant said, “Here is your next chocolate,” gave the participant another candy, and asked her to rate that one. Then the experimenter and her participant did the same thing again for three more chocolates, bringing the total number of candies to five. (The tasters never knew how many total chocolates they would be sampling.)

The crux of the experiment came just before people tasted the fifth chocolate. To half the participants, the research assistant said, “Here is your next chocolate.” But to the other half of the group, she said, “Here is your last chocolate.”