Sensitivity to the Duration of Negative Experiences in Retrospective Evaluations and Decisions

Many decisions rely on our memories of past experiences. We are, for instance, more likely to return to a store or website, if we had a positive past experience there, while a negative experience makes us less likely to return. However, psychological research shows that the duration of an experience, such as the time spent queuing in a store or waiting for a website to download, is neglected in subsequent decisions or retrospective evaluations of that store or website. On the other hand, marketing research suggests that the duration of queuing and website downloads have a negative effect on consumer choices and evaluations. To explore this paradox, we manipulate the duration of a negative picture-viewing experience lasting between 1 and 10 min. We find that participants require more money for repeating longer experiences, which they also evaluate as worse, and that this sensitivity to duration does not change over a two-week period. In contrast to the prevailing psychological literature, we show that, in this study, participants neither neglect nor forget the duration of a negative experience.