Behavioral New World
June 1, 2023
Vacation advice from behavioral economics
We all want our vacations to be enjoyable and memorable. What does behavioral economics suggest about how to make that happen? For the enjoyable bit, there is actually a formula for that: “APE”: anticipation + peak + end = maximum enjoyment.
Let’s pick that apart. For starters, Anticipation includes not only thinking about the upcoming vacation but also its planning:[1]
Planning and anticipating a trip can be almost as enjoyable as going on the trip itself, and there’s research to back it up. A 2014 Cornell University study delved into how the anticipation of an experience (like a trip) can increase a person’s happiness substantially—much more so than the anticipation of buying material goods. An earlier study, published by the University of Surrey in 2002, found that people are at their happiest when they have a vacation planned.[2]
To understand Peak and End, let’s consider a study by Daniel Kahneman, psychologist and Nobel Prize winner in Economics. He (and co-authors) studied how negatively people rated their experience of undergoing one of the world’s least favorite activities: a colonoscopy. (I can tell you from personal experience, a colonoscopy will not be the high point of your day. Or you’ve had a really bad day if it is.)
What they found, perhaps counterintuitively, was that overall ratings did not depend on the duration of the uncomfortable procedure. Rather, the ratings depended on the peak discomfort and the discomfort at the end.[3]
How does this finding help us design an optimal vacation? Flipping the logic of the colonoscopy study to positive events, our overall satisfaction with a vacation will also depend on the peak and end experiences.
I’m not sure that you can’t reliably plan a peak experience, as much as we might like to. Yes, you can put “See the Guernica” on your “must-see” list for the next time you’re in Madrid and that might well be your peak experience for that trip. But sometimes peak experiences pop up unplanned, e.g., being invited to a New Year’s Eve party in Ho Chi Minh City (aka Saigon; yes, this happened to me once – quite a blast!). I suggest that the key here is to remain open to serendipity. And your peak experience may not be the peak experience of your traveling companions.
As for the end experience, you can plan it, at least to a degree. Example: On a recent trip to Spain, my son and I decided to go to a very fine restaurant the last night before returning to the U.S.
Finally, advice about making your vacation memorable:
Snapping too many pictures could actually harm the brain's ability to retain memories, says Elizabeth Loftus, a psychological science professor at the University of California, Irvine. So you get the photo but kind of lose the memory.[4]
Makes sense to me. Like it or not, we all have limited brain capacity. If a chunk of our brain is devoted to framing and taking pictures, perhaps the experiences don’t “embed” quite as well in our memory. The experience itself and your memory of it will be richer if you are mindful, present, and in the moment.
So “go APE” to make your vacation enjoyable and resist taking lots of photos to make it more memorable.[5]
[1] For you semantics fans out there, “anticipation” includes action and thus does not mean the same as “expect.” Nonetheless, most people use the two words interchangeably.
[2] https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/article/planning-a-trip-is-good-for-you-especially-during-pandemic#:~:text=Planning%20and%20anticipating%20a%20trip,research%20to%20back%20it%20up.
[3] See Chapter 35 of Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, pp. 378-381.
[4] https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2021/08/05/1022041431/to-remember-the-moment-try-taking-fewer-photos
[5] More detailed suggestions for peak-end planning are in Chapter 6 of James Wallman’s excellent book, Time and How to Spend It.