I suspect that I would prefer the false memory of having been tortured for five minutes to the false memory of having been tortured for a year, assuming the memories are close replicas of what memories of the actual event would be like.
Actually, from what I read about related research in “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, it’s not clear that you would (or that the difference would be as large as you might expect, at least). It seems that memories of pain depend largely on the most intense moment of pain and on the final moment of pain, not necessarily on duration.
For example, in one experiment (I read the book a week ago and write from memory), subjects were asked to put their hand in a bowl of cold water (a painful experience) for two minutes, then they were asked to put their hands in cold water for two minutes, followed by the water being warmed gradually over another 5 minutes. (There were reasonable controls, obviously.) Then they were asked which experience to repeat. The majority chose experience two, even though intuitively it is strictly worse than experience one.
Of course, you’d have to find the actual related paper(s), check how high the correlation/ignoring-duration effect is, check if there’s significant inter-individual variation (whether maybe you’re an unusual person who cares about duration), but, regardless, there are significant reasons to doubt your intuitions in this scenario.
Actually, from what I read about related research in “Thinking, Fast and Slow”, it’s not clear that you would (or that the difference would be as large as you might expect, at least). It seems that memories of pain depend largely on the most intense moment of pain and on the final moment of pain, not necessarily on duration.
For example, in one experiment (I read the book a week ago and write from memory), subjects were asked to put their hand in a bowl of cold water (a painful experience) for two minutes, then they were asked to put their hands in cold water for two minutes, followed by the water being warmed gradually over another 5 minutes. (There were reasonable controls, obviously.) Then they were asked which experience to repeat. The majority chose experience two, even though intuitively it is strictly worse than experience one.
Of course, you’d have to find the actual related paper(s), check how high the correlation/ignoring-duration effect is, check if there’s significant inter-individual variation (whether maybe you’re an unusual person who cares about duration), but, regardless, there are significant reasons to doubt your intuitions in this scenario.
… huh.
I wonder if we might actually value experiences this way?
Daniel Kahneman suggests that we do. We remember thing imperfectly and optimize for the way we remember things. Wiki has a quick summary.