How the remembering self shapes your decision making

The remembering self can positively influence your decision-making. It can help you to learn from past events to make better choices in the future. By looking back on the results of your decisions, you can find patterns and trends that will inform your future actions. For example, when choosing between watching one more hour of TV or going to sleep early, you may remember how bad it felt working in the morning sleep-deprived. You can then choose to sleep early despite forgoing the pleasure you would've gotten from watching TV. You are empowered to make good decisions for the long term. On the other hand, the remembering self can also negatively influence decision-making. It may cause you to overvalue the significance of past events, making you less open to new experiences. For example, if you had a terrible time at a theme park when you were young, you become less likely to try a different theme park altogether. You miss out on potential fun and joy. Additionally, the remembering self does not take into account the whole experience. It mainly considers how the peak and end of an experience felt. As the ice-water experiment shows, it may lead you to make decisions that are not optimal for the experiencing self. Overall, it is good to be aware of the role that the remembering self plays in our decision-making process. Our memories can be a good guide, but they are not perfect.