Experienced versus remembered utility: which self should policy serve?

Daniel Kahneman, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The self that has the experience and the self that remembers it are not the same, they disagree systematically, and the remembering self is the one that makes the decisions.¹²³⁴⁵

Sources

1. An individual With a talent for introspection might be able to specify current goals and ongoing activities, the present state of physical comfort or discomfort, mental content, and many subtle aspects of subjective experience, of which valence is only one. What happens to these moments? The answer is straightforward: with very few exceptions, they simply disappear.

   Living and Thinking About It, Two Perspectives on Life, pp. 1–2

2. In the 'short' episode, they held a hand in water at 14°C for 60 seconds, experiencing substantial pain. The 'long' episode lasted 90 seconds. The first 60 seconds were identical to the short episode; over the final 30 seconds the temperature was gradually raised to 15°C, still unpleasant but less so. From the point of view of the experiencing self, the long trial is clearly worse.

   Living and Thinking About It, Two Perspectives on Life, pp. 2–3

3. So which should matter? What should the physician do? The choice has implications for medical practice. We noted that: e If the objective is to reduce patients' memory of pain, lowering the peak intensity of pain could be more important than minimizing the duration of the procedure.

   Thinking, Fast and Slow

4. The experiencing self does not have a voice. The remembering self is sometimes wrong, but it is the one that keeps score and governs what we learn from living, and it is the one that makes decisions Jon thaperienci. What we learn from the past is to maximize the qualities of our future memories, not necessarily of our future experience. This is the tyranny of the remembering self. Which Self Should Count?

   Thinking, Fast and Slow

5. With David Schkade and the famous jurist Cass Sunstein I extended this idea into a program of research on arbitrariness in punitive damage decisions, which may yet have some influence on policy (Sunstein, Kahneman, Schkade and Ritov, 2002).

   Autobiographical Essay

Where the argument is made

• Back to Bentham? Explorations of Experienced Utility (Quarterly Journal of Economics, 1997)
• Living, and Thinking About It: Two Perspectives on Life, with Jason Riis (2005)
• High Income Improves Evaluation of Life but not Emotional Well-Being, with Angus Deaton (PNAS, 2010)
• Income and Emotional Well-Being: A Conflict Resolved, with Killingsworth and Mellers (PNAS, 2023)

How the argument was received

Well established empirically; the normative question of which self policy should serve is open.