Psychologyspeaking topic
A vacation full of good days ends badly, and you remember the whole trip as terrible. The mind doesn't average an experience; it weighs the most intense moment and the ending. Why can the self that lives an experience and the self that remembers it never agree?
— the peak-end rule (Kahneman)
practice with this topic
Set the timer (5-30 min), take 20 seconds of prep if you like, start talking. Jot your thoughts onto the sticky-note board.
similar topics
- The 36 questions experiment: strangers who answer a set of increasingly personal questions together can develop closeness, even love. Is intimacy woven slowly over time, or built in a moment of the right shared vulnerability?
- Before you learn a word, its concept is a blur; afterwards you suddenly see it everywhere. Hear 'schadenfreude' once and you start spotting it in everyone. Does the word create something new, or reveal what was always there? How many things sit in plain sight, invisible, in the world of concepts we haven't learned yet?
- In Dweck's research, telling children 'you worked so hard' instead of 'you're so smart' made them more resilient. Why does the way we are praised shape how we handle failure?
- The self-fulfilling prophecy: how does believing something trigger the very behavior that makes it come true? Does a teacher's faith in a child actually change that child's success?
- If I am what I have and if I lose what I have who then am I?