How Colonoscopies Are Like Home Renovations - NYTimes.com

It's a law of nature: Everyone who undertakes major home renovations ends up loathing their contractor. When I was recently redoing my kitchen and bathroom, I finally figured out why. It has nothing to do with the contractor's honesty, quality of work, punctuality or the mess they make. It's about behavioral economics and human psychology — in particular, the unusual way that we assess pain. In the early '90s, the psychologist Daniel Kahneman and his colleagues did a series of experiments that revealed how people remembered the pain of a situation. In one experiment, participants held a hand in an ice-water bath (of 14 degrees Celsius) for 60 seconds — a pretty painful experience. To be precise: an 8.3 on a 10-point pain scale. In a second experiment they held their hand in the same ice-water bath for 60 seconds and then for another 30 seconds, during which the water was warmed just 1 degree. This small increase had a big effect: afterward, when people were asked which experiment they would prefer to have repeated (for money), two-thirds preferred the second — the experiment that lasted longer and, therefore, had more overall pain. Dr. Kahneman's conclusion was that people don't evaluate the pain of an experience by summing up the overall total. Instead, they remember the pain at the very end — and whether it got better or worse. This was confirmed in 2003 by another experiment by Dr. Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in 2002, and his fello...
Source: Psychology of Pain - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs