It’s not every day that you get to sit in the same room as someone who collaborates with Nobel Prize Winners — although lately it seems to be happening to me quite frequently — so last Wednesday’s talk at the London Judgment and Decision Making group seminar was definitely one of the two high points of my day. The other was discussing Manuel Castells and network theory at the school gate.

Daniel Kahneman’s colleague, Talya Miron-Shatz, spoke about her research into how we evaluate what she called “multi-episode, multi-featured experiences”. The gist of it all was that we weight the negative over the positive. She identified that this had direct application for those interested in consumer preferences, or seeking to improve customer satisfaction levels. For instance, hotels would be better advised to concentrate their efforts on finding and removing flaws in their service than in expanding the features and facilities available.

So, the best thing about the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras Station – which I wandered through on my way home — may not be Europe’s longest champagne bar, or the twenty minutes shaved off the journey time to Paris/Brussels. It may be the fact that you don’t require a 20p piece if you’re caught short and need the toilets. Which makes a really convenient change from Paddington. St Pancras will definitely be one of my target properties the next time I play Monopoly.

Dr Miron-Shatz and colleagues studied the way that groups of women evaluated their days using a happiness rating. This revealed that the appearance of a low (i.e. bad experience) during the day would be a much stronger predictor of the subject’s overall evaluation of the day than if the day was marked by a peak/a combination of peaks and lows/no peaks and lows (i.e. a dull day). She also showed that the last event of the day contributed little to the day’s overall evaluation.

Like Kahneman, Miron-Shatz is a behavioural economist, having majored in the confirmation bias. She comes at the subject of decision-making from the heuristic point of view, preferring to model human behaviour via an understanding of salience and the way we apply mental shortcuts. She and her colleagues challenge a more normative approach — that we might rationally evaluate our experiences, equally weighting events and episodes for how good they make us feel, and for how long.

It makes sense to me that the negative outweighs the positive, confirming the word-of-mouth marketing mantra that one negative word is worth a hundred positive. And when it comes to Amazon reviews, it is all too easy to be put off a useful purchase, or waste extra time researching because of one negative comment from someone who perhaps does not know what they are talking about, or was unlucky.

But for some reason, the idea that we do not strictly duration-weight our experiences and that peaks, lows and salience play a much bigger role than quantity-times-quality brought to mind something much more profound that Daniel Barenboim said in his 2006 BBC Reith Lectures:-

And the first thing that I think of, having lived all these years in this terrible conflict that we live in the Middle East, because I grew up there and I feel part of it, and to live daily with so many horrible things that happen, I have been always every day asking myself since I was a very small boy, why is it that so much of the day goes by and nothing happens and then something happens at a certain moment of the day that influences not only everything I think and feel after the event but everything that I have known and felt before. And I’m sorry, but I learned this in a much stronger way from the music.

I have here on [sic] musical example which I would like to play for you, of exactly that, of the moment where there comes a fantastic vertical pressure on the horizontal floor of the music… My point is that I learned the fact that there is a vertical pressure on the horizontal floor, that there is something that shows at a certain moment that we have to accept the inevitability of something that has changed our life both to the future and to the end. And it is the moment in a passage in the last movement of the ninth symphony by Beethoven where the text is: ‘And the cherub stat for Gott, for Gott, for Gott’.

Well returning to more prosaic matters, for some reason, despite the toilets, the champagne bar, the cappuccino and the very large £1 million bronze statue of two lovers meeting by Paul Day the images I came away from St Pancras Station were almost entirely negative .

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