The peak-end effect is a cognitive-psychology heuristic describing how people evaluate the overall quality of a past experience: rather than integrating across the full duration, the mind's retrospective judgment is dominated by the experience's most intense moment (the peak) and its final moment (the end). A closely related principle, duration neglect, holds that the length of an experience contributes little or nothing to its remembered evaluation, since only the peak and end are weighted. Both belong to the study of heuristics and biases in memory and judgment/decision-making within cognitive psychology.
The peak-end effect is a cognitive-psychology heuristic describing how people evaluate the overall quality of a past experience: rather than integrating across the full duration, the mind's retrospec…