Rung 9 · Graded exposure
Two minutes with someone you find attractive
Two minutes of conversation with someone you find attractive. End it yourself, warmly, while it is still good.
Your attempts
Nothing is recorded against this rung. The dread you feel next time will be a guess, and you will have nothing to check it against.
Why this one
Attraction is what turns a conversation into a performance. Capping it at two minutes and leaving first makes the ending something you authored rather than something that happened to you.
What it buys — Most of the dread on the asking rungs is dread of the ending. Author three endings and the rest get cheaper.
Retrospective judgements of an experience are dominated by its most intense moment and by how it ended; overall duration barely registers.
What it cannot show — Laboratory episodes of pain and pleasure lasting minutes. The extension to conversations, evenings and relationships is ours.
Here — Established with pain and pleasure episodes in the lab. Applying it to the shape of a conversation is our extension.
When to climb
Three logged attempts running at 2 or under, each ended by you. One that ran out on its own is not this rung.
Those two numbers are ours, not a finding. Graded exposure is clinical; where the line sits is our judgement.
Rung 10 — Say the less-charming true thingSource
Fredrickson & Kahneman (1993); Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber & Redelmeier (1993). Duration Neglect in Retrospective Evaluations of Affective Episodes; When More Pain Is Preferred to Less. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65(1); Psychological Science, 4(6).
The full version of this rung, with the rest of its topic, is exercise 09 of that lesson.