Throughout his career, psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman has made pioneering contributions to various domains of scientific inquiry including behavioral economics, decision-making and intuitive judgment, and hedonistic psychology. A primary concern in his work is the prevalence of cognitive biases and how thinking, feeling, and perceiving are substantially impacted by faulty assumptions and errors of logic and reasoning. A focus of Kahneman is the distinction between what he calls the experiencing self and the remembering self. As he and his colleague Jason Riis explain, “When we are asked ‘how good was the vacation’, it is not an experiencing self that answers, but a remembering and evaluating self, the self that keeps score … It is a basic fact of the human condition that memories are what we get to keep from our experience, and the only perspective that we can adopt as we think about our lives is therefore that of the remembering self.”

Kahneman explores the paradoxes and problems implicit in how we live life as opposed to how we evaluate life. He argues that actual experience and the narratives we construct about experience are motivated by unique factors, are associated with different types and degrees of happiness, and influence decision-making and action in disparate and often flawed ways. For example, according to Kahneman evaluative memory (mobilized by the remembering self) is highly prone to distortion; due to numerous errors of perception including the peak/end rule, what actually occurred is often confused and frequently made illusory by our construction of experience.

In the next in-person meeting of the Men’s Group Seminar on Saturday, March 18, 2023 (10:15 to 11:30 AM), we will explore Kahneman’s views of the cognitive processes involved in living and remembering, as well as the implications of these two dimensions on well-being. The TED talk “The Riddle of Experience vs. Memory” and YouTube interview “Experiencing Self and Remembering Self,” along with the article “Living, and Thinking about It: Two Perspectives on Life,” will be the focus of the seminar.

* Registration Directions: If you would like to attend the in-person meetings of the Men’s Group Seminar and/or the Relationship Group Seminar on March 18, 2023, please RSVP to me at 949-338-4388 or jt@jamestobinphd.com on or before Thursday, March 16, 2023. The fee is $30.00 for each seminar and informed consent for participation must be completed. Seminars are held at 15615 Alton Parkway, Suite 450, in Irvine, CA. Please note that the Men’s Group Seminar and the Relationship Group Seminar are psychoeducational in nature, not therapeutic, and do not constitute psychotherapy or counseling.