Peak-End Rule

The peak-end rule appears in Stop Asking Questions as a cognitive bias that shapes how people remember an experience: humans recall two moments above all others — the peak (most intense point) and the end. The book uses it as a practical warning for interviewers and conversationalists. The author recounts saving the toughest question for last, which “unwittingly stacked the peak and the end into one dramatic moment” — the only thing the guest remembered from the whole talk, and the reason she left upset. The lesson is that the ordering of questions, not just their content, determines what a conversation is remembered for.

Context: The peak-end rule is a heuristic from the behavioral economics of Daniel Kahneman and colleagues: retrospective judgments of an experience are dominated by its most extreme moment and its conclusion, rather than by the sum or average of the whole.

Where this appears

• Stop Asking Questions — named and defined as the bias to manage when ordering interview questions; placing the hardest question last fuses the peak and the end into the one thing a guest remembers