Sarah Binau - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Sarah Binau

Peak End Rule (Kahneman, 1993; 2011) suggests that the average of the peak and end moments of an ... more Peak End Rule (Kahneman, 1993; 2011) suggests that the average of the peak and end moments of an event disproportionately affect memory and thus perception of the experience. We investigate PER's application to the experience of reading fiction. Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl" (2012) is an ideal case study because it is commercially popular but, unlike most popular novels, has a distinctly amoral ending. We hypothesize that humans expect moral payoffs at the end of narrative fiction, and that when these expectations are not met (i.e., pain at the end of the experience), as in the case of "Gone Girl," readers' perceptions of the story will be influenced by this pain and manifest as disappointment and dislike. We reference existing models in evolutionary psychology, which seek to explain human altruism, and models in cognitive science, which seek to explain patterns in memory and assessment. To quantify disappointment and dislike, we conduct a programmatic corpus linguistic analysis of 40,000 web-scraped Amazon product reviews of "Gone Girl," comparing them to reviews of eight other similarly popular novels from the same year. Results show that reader sentiments about "Gone Girl," both the overall review ratings and analysis on a sentence-by-sentence basis, are more positive than for the comparison novels. When only reviews mentioning "end" are analyzed, however, the effect reverses, with a similar finding at the more granular level of sentences mentioning "end." These findings support our hypothesis that moral endings, or lack thereof, significantly shape reader perceptions of a novel.

Peak End Rule (Kahneman, 1993; 2011) suggests that the average of the peak and end moments of an ... more Peak End Rule (Kahneman, 1993; 2011) suggests that the average of the peak and end moments of an event disproportionately affect memory and thus perception of the experience. We investigate PER's application to the experience of reading fiction. Gillian Flynn's "Gone Girl" (2012) is an ideal case study because it is commercially popular but, unlike most popular novels, has a distinctly amoral ending. We hypothesize that humans expect moral payoffs at the end of narrative fiction, and that when these expectations are not met (i.e., pain at the end of the experience), as in the case of "Gone Girl," readers' perceptions of the story will be influenced by this pain and manifest as disappointment and dislike. We reference existing models in evolutionary psychology, which seek to explain human altruism, and models in cognitive science, which seek to explain patterns in memory and assessment. To quantify disappointment and dislike, we conduct a programmatic corpus linguistic analysis of 40,000 web-scraped Amazon product reviews of "Gone Girl," comparing them to reviews of eight other similarly popular novels from the same year. Results show that reader sentiments about "Gone Girl," both the overall review ratings and analysis on a sentence-by-sentence basis, are more positive than for the comparison novels. When only reviews mentioning "end" are analyzed, however, the effect reverses, with a similar finding at the more granular level of sentences mentioning "end." These findings support our hypothesis that moral endings, or lack thereof, significantly shape reader perceptions of a novel.