How Do People Evaluate Their Day? Testing Assumptions of the Day Reconstruction Method

The Day Reconstruction Method (DRM), developed by Daniel Kahneman and colleagues, is a diary-based approach designed to measure people’s emotional well-being throughout the day. Participants divide the previous day into distinct episodes and report how they felt during each one. Researchers then calculate an individual’s overall well-being—what Kahneman has termed “objective happiness”—as the duration-weighted average of emotional experiences across all episodes.
However, it remains unclear whether this is actually how people evaluate their day. In existing well-being research using the DRM, this assumption has rarely been questioned or tested empirically. Other psychological studies, including those by Kahneman himself, suggest that retrospective evaluations of experiences often follow different cognitive rules—such as the peak–end rule (judging experiences by their most intense and final moments) or duration neglect (disregarding how long episodes lasted).
This project examines how people truly aggregate their emotional experiences when evaluating their day. Using novel data from the German Job Seeker Panel (GJSP)—to our knowledge, the first DRM study that also asks respondents to rate their overall emotional experience of the day—we will test which aggregation models best predict people’s overall evaluations. By comparing the predictive power of duration-weighted averages, peak–end models, and other heuristics, this study will provide new insights into how individuals form summary judgments of their daily well-being and improve the interpretation of time-use and well-being data.