Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Peak End Rule (Kahneman, 1993; 2011) suggests that the averageof the peak and end moments of an event disproportionately affectmemory and thus perception of the experience. We investigatePER’s application to the experience of reading fiction. GillianFlynn’s Gone Girl (2012) is an ideal case study because it iscommercially popular but, unlike most popular novels, has adistinctly amoral ending. We hypothesize that humans expect moralpayoffs at the end of narrative fiction, and that when theseexpectations are not met (i.e., pain at the end of the experience), asin the case of Gone Girl, readers’ perceptions of the story will beinfluenced by this pain and manifest as disappointment and dislike.We reference existing models in evolutionary psychology, whichseek to explain human altruism, and models in cognitive science,which seek to explain patterns in memory and assessment. Toquantify disappointment and dislike, we conduct a programmaticcorpus linguistic analysis of 40,000 web-scraped Amazon productreviews of Gone Girl, comparing them to reviews of eight othersimilarly popular novels from the same year. Results show thatreader sentiments about Gone Girl, both the overall review ratingsand analysis on a sentence-by-sentence basis, are more positive thanfor the comparison novels. When only reviews mentioning “end”are analyzed, however, the effect reverses, with a similar finding atthe more granular level of sentences mentioning “end.” Thesefindings support our hypothesis that moral endings, or lack thereof,significantly shape reader perceptions of a novel.