Questioning the End Effect: Endings Do Not Inherently Have a Disproportionate Impact on Evaluations of Experiences

Abstract

The present research re-examines one of the most basic findings regarding the evaluation of hedonic experiences: the end effect. The end effect suggests that people’s retrospective evaluations of an experience are disproportionately influenced by the final moments of the experience. The findings in this paper indicate that endings are not inherently over-weighted in retrospective evaluations. That is, episodes do not disproportionately affect the evaluation of an experience simply because they occur at the end. We replicate prior demonstrations of the end effect, but provide additional evidence implicating other processes as driving factors of those findings.