Daniel Kahneman || A Remarkable Life, Fast and Slow

[Music] today it's great to chat with daniel kahneman one of the most influential psychologists of all time kahneman is known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision making as well as behavioral economics for which he was awarded the 2002 nobel memorial prize in economic sciences he's author of the best-selling book thinking fast and slow and co-author of the recent book noise a fall in judgment in 2013 cotteman received the presidential medal of freedom from barack obama daniel's so great to chat with you today it's a pleasure to be here um i'm so excited to chat with you you are such a legend in the field as you know and there's so much uh we could talk about and i know we're going to get into all the nerdy stuff but i actually want to start with more of the humanity of you because i i think your personal story and and sort of uh where you're born and what you live through is is is utterly fascinating and um and and just like a one-of-a-kind kind of experience so you were born in um in tel aviv but you spent most of your childhood in paris um when it was occupied by nazi germany in 1940. that's is that right that's great yeah so you went for this time where you know even your father was picked up in the first major round of french jews but he was released six weeks later um due to the intervention of his employer um do you recall um could you do you have that memory in your head of like visiting that uh that concentration camp or visiting where he was imprisoned yeah yeah i have a very vivid memory actually so you know because it's it was like a fortress and of course we couldn't come close to it there was there was a wall and there were policemen and there were lots of people hanging on you know all the windows and lots of women and children it was still you know the extermination hadn't started yet so we were still there and one thing i do remember is a policeman telling us they're hungry in there they're eating peels and that that is an image of kept i've also kept the image of of my father when he was released by the way the story of his release is an interesting one because the his employer was a fascist in fact he was one of the most important collaborators with the nazis in france but he really loved my father and he had enough clout with the germans to get my father released as it were as if he were essential to the to the war efforts to the german war effort because my father was a specialist in pains he was a kid amazing and and when he came back he was um skit you know basically skin and bones but he came back in a suit is that right with dignity yeah i mean that's that is another image that i have um he weighed i mean he was a short man he had a childhood disease so he was less than five foot six i think five foot five uh and but he he weighed 45 kilos which uh 45 kilos would be about 100 pounds actually exactly 100 pounds and there was very little of him but my mother and i had gone out to be and we planned to be there to greet him but he had come before us and had taken a bath and had put on a suit and was waiting for us before eating although he must have been very very hungry and and that image he is the one who opened the door uh that's an image of him that have kept yes and there's another story that i heard that just touched me so much where you know there was this curfew i guess after 6 p.m jews couldn't uh leave the house and you were staying late at a friend's house and you were coming home after that and you turned your shirt inside out so that the jewish star wouldn't be visible so you wouldn't get in trouble and a guard saw you and what happened next well he was an ss soldier actually he was he was wearing a black uniform and i i was seven at the time but um but i knew that they were the worst of the worst and uh and we were walking uh about to meet i actually went a few years back i went and i i checked my memory of what the street looked like and i know and i found the exact spot where wow where this had happened but um and you know we walked towards each other and he beckoned me and and he picked me up and he hugged me and i was really frightened that he would see into my sweater and see that i was wearing a star of david and then but he didn't he put me down he opened his wallet he showed me a picture of a little boy and he gave me some money and then he went his way i went mine and and yeah that's uh that's a story and i remember quite vividly and your mom had told you uh that that humans are endlessly complicated and fascinating and um that certainly dovetails with your mom's wisdom there yeah i mean that that i really remember because uh it is true that uh my mom was a gossip but she was an interesting gossip and and nothing was black and white and gossip wasn't about stories it was about people's character and uh and it was always complicated and i remember thinking that this is really complicated i mean here is this man he would just as soon kill me but he has a little boy just like me and he has emotions just like my father um so this yeah this is the you know the start of of seeing the complexity of human psychology there um in such a remarkable way um so when france was liberated so you moved around um you know when your father came back kind of kind of on the right so we escaped you know that france was divided at the time between occupied france which was literally occupied by the germans and sort of uh the the other part of france which was sort of governed by french fascists who collaborated with the germans but they were less bad to the jews of course and so we escaped there in 1942 when i was eight and uh that's where we spent the rest of them and then the germans rolled into that area when when the allies were threatening invasion and and then the situation became very very well impossible for the jews and so we moved we moved around we ended the war in a chicken group actually a converted chicken next to a cafe in a small village in the middle of france in nearly and uh and that's where my father died and that's where we were he died six weeks before d-day before the allies invaded europe and uh and that's where we were when the war ended amazing you know it's just amazing it's what is amazing as well is that that young children go through these things and without you thinking it's not i mean you know it at some level it's not normal but it can kind of you know you don't know any other kind of life right you know i remember my grandmom um telling me uh because she escaped the pogroms in russia in and i remember her telling me how she hid in a wagon and went from engine and it was just like oh this is what normal children do they escape they escape guards in a wagon you know what was it you know just thinking back your memory of of what you were thinking during that time do you remember thinking yourself you know like like this this is wrong like or did you think yourself oh this is just normal no i mean i knew it wasn't yeah and i mean when one of the thoughts that that i remember having was and the sister was nine years older than i was so i was nine she was 18 and and she could have joined the resistance the french resistance but it turned out later that i was the only member of the family to whom this thought occurred because our mentality were the mentality of hunted rabbits and hunted rabbits just don't fight back when they just try to survive another day and uh that that was very an important part actually of my identity and and that made living in israel moving to israel a very uh major experience in my life because israel was a symbol of not being rabbits anymore i mean this is a place where you can defend yourself where you can be strong and and during the war the main thing that you know i was was weakness and strength and the idea that you know rabbits are weak and i even thought that my father was weak was weak for dying when we needed him and uh so young that was i lived through that but i should add i don't think that this shaped me in any profound way i don't you know i don't know what i would have been with with different experiences but i really do not trace anything that happened to me to those years fascinating um i guess we don't we won't we can't do the experiment but it must have um it verily shaped your interest in human psychology yeah you probably did yeah yeah um so france was liberated and in 1946 the family moved um to palestine um this this is this is pre israel this is this is this is at the the birth you're literally at the birth of a nation right you know um what was it it wasn't called palestine it was called uh the british mandatory palestine right or something like that yeah yeah um what what i my only question there is what was that like i mean there's not many people i can ask what was it like to live at the birth of israel that's right not all that many um well i remember we moved there in 1946 and in 1947 there was a u.n declaration that allowed the state a jewish state to exist and i remember dancing in the streets i was 13 then and and the war began as soon as the british uh retreated israel was attacked by the arab countries around it and and yeah there was a war and it lasted off and on for more than a year um the casualty level was huge uh by you know the standards of today there were one percent of the population of the population at the beginning died in the war but by the end of the war in 1949 it was you know it was a new country and [Music] and it was still very new when i went into the army where well i don't know if you wanted to go into that yeah go into it go into it well uh so everything was really new and you know everything had to be improvised from uniforms to to rules regulations what have you uh i went i was 17 when i graduated from high school and there was a special unit of the the israeli army that was called the academic reserve and uh where it was the equivalent of rotc but um where uh you well went through officer training during the summers but went to university and i studied psychology and mathematics and in 1954 i went into the army so that's a very long time ago and i was a platoon commander for a year and then i became a psychologist because you know i had a ba in psychology and as with a ba in psychology i was the best trained psychologist in the israeli army i mean there was my direct commander i was in a research unit and my direct commander was a chemist his training had been in chemistry absolutely a brilliant man and and we were doing things that uh well you know i was assigned to do things that i had no business doing like setting up an interviewing system for the israeli army which i did and only recently i i got a copy of the report that i wrote in 1956 it's signed by lieutenant connema uh with my number very short number because this was really the beginning i mean the numbers now the soldiers numbers are much much longer but um and i described you know how i had set up the interview and it turned out that that interview and everything around it had a profound influence on my career and on my thinking and it's actually i'm really ending my career by repeating the main principles that guided me when i did when i created that interview in 1956 so that's the this is surely an unusual uh and very fortunate experience because the idea of the interview i had read a book by paul me i mean my my boss the chemist had given me that book to read it had just come out and i was very influenced by it and by the idea that you really couldn't trust people's judgments and that you wanted things to be as objective as possible and so i constructed instead of the clinical interview where your objective is to form a mental image of your patient of your patient or the recruit whoever it is the system that existed in the israeli army when i came in was was a clinical interview where people had to interviewed recruits and decided how fit they were for combat and and there was enough information to know that that interview was had no validity or whatsoever or almost none and so i was assigned to improve on it and from menial i i learned that reliability is essential and so instead of having people form an intuitive opinion i had them rate six traits that is the interview was divided into six parts each associated with a particular trait that they had to rate on a scale from one to five at the end of each part of the interview and they were strongly discouraged from trying to form a general image until all the information was in and so that was uh the that was the interview and there were interviewers i was like 22 at the time and they were 20 but you know i was i was in charge and and they were furious with me and they were furious with me because they had been doing those clinical interviews and they had been using their intuitions and they had been feeling very good about their intuitions and uh and i remember one of them saying you're turning us into robots that is because i you know there were questions it wasn't this it was a semi-structured interview there was a list of questions about each of several traits like how punctual you were how sociable you were i had one that was called masculine pride which today you wouldn't want to to use that term but at the time it seemed very fitting and and so i told them uh you know i realized that that the morale was at stake that they it was really unacceptable to them not to have an outlet for their intuition and so i told them you do the interview my way and don't worry about validity you worry about reliability i mean in my arrogance i said i will worry about the validity you worry about being reliable but when you're done close your eyes and make a judgment of how good a soldier with that soldier be and there are two stories associated with that the first one is that a few months later we got data on the validity of the interview um four various criteria like being sent to office of training or or going to jail or or different things that could happen to a soldier and it turns out that the interview was really significant validity was a big improvement in what had happened before but what was quite remarkable in the results but that intuitive judgment at the very end was very good in fact it was just as good as the average of the six ratings which i thought we would use and it added information so the final score where the average of the average were the six ratings and the final rating because that script came out that it was independently valid and that stayed with me all my life that is that you should watch it you shouldn't trust intuition but ultimately you have to have it and ultimately it's a wonderful thing but you have to delay it and it turns out that in the book that i'm writing and working on i was working on until a couple of months ago which is coming out in may we have a recommendation for how to make judgments and decisions and it's break the problem rate each respect for the problem independently delay intuition then look at the profile of your ratings and follow your judgment uh so that stayed with me evidently for over 60 years that's incredible so the start of your psychology career in a way showed you that there is a uh the intuition can be spot on yeah you know that's that's that's really uh that's that's really cool and we're gonna we're gonna get to that later the intelligence of intuition for sure um so just to kind of wrap up this early um part of your life after you got your um then you went and got a phd right from berkeley yeah and your dissertation was advised by susan irvin um it examined relations between adjectives and the semantic differential um uh and also you got a chance to do fortron programming i think that you and i think you enjoyed it um i remember uh pascal i think with programming in my childhood but even before pascal was fortron right so that was even before my before was the very first language that was accessible to non-programmers it was a compile language but it was very very basic and i was actually i think in the first or second course that was ever given to sort of civilians on the use of fortran was given at mit in 1960 it lasted a week and that's where i learned fortran one which was really that's when it that's when it began that's the beginning that's the beginning my my thesis program which so i spent most most of the effort was programming it would take 20 minutes on the berkeley mainframe and i could watch the berkeley mainframe you could watch it you know from a window and there were nine large tape units and my program used them all and and i could tell whether the program was working by whether the tapes were working in the proper sequence just think of what what it was then that was the berkeley mainframe the main computer of the university of california in berkeley and think of your iphone today so that's that's what's happened in my lifetime well we've we definitely have come a long way it'll be interesting to see where it is like 60 years from now if it's going to be the same exponential rate so your early work focused on visual perception and attention um your first post was at the hebrew university of jerusalem in 1961. how did you make a shift from visual perception and attention which are you know staples of the cognitive science field i was trained in that you everyone in cognitive science phd you start with that you know i feel like um and then how did you move into judgment decision making i believe that was when you when you met uh uh taversky right yeah i mean emmauskey was a young colleague of mine at hebrew university was three years younger and he was known to everybody as the most brilliant person and i invited him as a guest in a seminar that i was teaching and he gave a talk in in that seminar on work not that he had done himself on work that was being done at michigan at the time on the study that was called the study of injurious the decisions and the conclusion of that study was people are pretty good intuitive to this difference so that's that's the work that he described and i had been teaching statistics and i had had experiences about how miserable people are including myself as the intuitive fitness difference so i i i knew this was wrong and and israelis have a style of debating that is world famous it's quite merciless and so i engaged almost in that debate in front of the class and it turned out to be a very good conversation i think i won that debate because that's what started our joint work which was basically questioning intuitive statistics so that's and then we became very close friends and the rest is history so to speak really yeah in a way i mean it turned out that this was a very important friendship we it dominated our lives for you know 10 12 years we spent hours every day together nuts and there was really no no separation between work and fun because work was so much fun and the study of because of the topic that they had chosen the topic that were chosen was incorrect intuitions and our subjects we were our own subjects so we were looking for cases in which our own intuitions were flawed and that is a sort of ironic and sort of very funny uh and almost had a really extraordinary sense of humor you and he loved laughing and he made me laugh and he made me he improved my sense of humor so i made him laugh and uh we laughed a lot and that was very happy it's beautiful um so let me just get this straight so when you were in this meeting and you challenged him a little bit about the um positive aspects of intuition was were you drawing on your intuition to say that intuition isn't uh as positive as he's made it out to be or were you basing it on some other research conclusion the conclusion of that michigan research where that people are essentially bayesian which means that they make correctiveness from data except that they are conservative bayesian that is they do not they they do not draw enough from information and i said this is absurd uh in fact and and i cited something that i attributed to danny k who was then a very famous comedian very little of him remains but uh he had described a person as a woman that's what i remember it turned out they that i misremembered some of it but as he said that her famous a favorite position is besides herself and her favorite sport is jumping to conclusions and and this idea that people jump to conclusions is you know when you it's obvious that it takes very little for us to form a complete image and that was so clearly incompatible with the idea of people being conservative bayesian that it made that idea seem silly i think uh anyway i still think so uh not everybody agrees of course yeah that's what set us up i love it you know you talk about the importance of adversarial cl you call adversarial collaboration now what a perfect example of a situation where you form such a a warm friendship with someone uh well this was not you know it wasn't that adversarial it wasn't adversary yeah that's fair enough that's fair from the beginning well maybe gary klein fits more into that uh that that situation um so we can we can talk about gary kline in a second so this is a research um that he had gary klein had been spending his career basically studying um expertise in tuition and you know firefighters and other fields and just how right they can be when they do rely on their intuition and i think you too thought there were more areas of disagreement than there really were when you finally got your heads together to write a paper about it is that right well you know it's a it's a fairly complicated story i had you know as i told you i had always believed that that there is there are marvels to intuition so i had never believed that there is nothing to it and in fact i had i remember that i had reviewed an early grant application by gary and i which i had reviewed favorably when i was still in jerusalem very long time ago and so i invited gary i said look i mean you and i have completely but it seemed to be completely contradictory beliefs i mean you are you believe in experts you believe in tuition i question experts i question intuition we must both be right let's find out where we're right so let's find out the boundary where is intuition good and where does it fail and he agreed and it's not that it was easy that took us six years but at the end of six years we had we had the paper that was i think pretty good and we had a friendship we became so that was the most successful adversarial collaboration oh beautiful can you remind me the title of the paper because i really liked the title i remember when i saw it paper was a failure to disagree a failure to disagree i love that it's that expert intuition of failure to disagree i think that's the point but the failure to disagree is certainly in the time i'd like to take a moment 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had these dreams when you're young like i'm going to be a famous psychologist you sort of in in a sense you know fell into these topics and then they captivated your interest and you and you did great work with them you know um i mean how would you describe the situation why were you so great uh well you know i i started off actually feeling that my training had been inferior because i had you know i've been let loose in berkeley i really didn't study systematically i just read and i studied and picked up a lot of things and i remember that when i came to hebrew university i decided that i would like eventually to become a chef for everyone but i first of all have to learn to be a short order cook and so i started a realist very limited and very precise experimental project on vision which i continued for several years and i felt i was in training that i was training myself to become an experimental psychologist and when i when i met almost uh i mean i i was taught to me to become slightly more ambitious but i certainly had no i had no expectations of any major success now he was already a star so he was a star from graduate school and immediately recognized herself i was good but he was a stop and uh and then together we were i think better than he was i mean we were far better than either of us uh and so i was very lucky so was he it sounds like just a special just a really special collaboration a once-in-a-lifetime kind of collaboration that um people be very lucky to find in their careers oh yes yeah i um i have a few people like that in my life i want to give a shout out to colin de young and david yaden and james kaufman and other researchers um you know when you get when you get these special people you know in your academic collaborations you know you you want to hold on to them you know let's talk about system one versus system two um uh could you explain to our listeners a little bit about uh well just how you would define the difference between the two before we really nerd out about this well um there is a long history in psychology of the distinction between automatic processing and control processes and it started out with the studies of search and how you start searching say for a letter for a particular target letter in in a set of letters and and you do that hundreds and hundreds of times you look for that letter and eventually that letter pops out that you search changes character it becomes something becomes automatic and this is something that happens in skill learning we learn to drive and then you can drive without thinking you you learn to speak a foreign language and then and then you speak it without having to translate from your original language so we had that experience of those two modes and that's been studied fairly extensively and there were many people drawing on that distinction and the terms system one and system two were invented by one of these people keith stanovich was also interested in the field of judgment and decision making so he was doing research using problems that emma stursky and i had developed so i was familiar with his work and i i really loved that distinction between the two because it seemed to resolve the controversy in which we had been involved so we did a lot of work on failures of intuitive thinking which were sort of failures of thinking so we but other people found that you could find create variations on those problems or create different contexts in which people could solve those problems so there seemed to be and they questioned our conclusions but it turned out that the distinction between system one and system two is very useful in this context because what these people had done who found that our errors they could make as it were cognitive illusions disappear it's a well-known german psychologist gerd gigerenzo was sort of an intellectual adversary unders and that's this phrase it's a title when i participate with making cognitive illusions disappear but you can make cognitive illusions disappear by providing cues that mobilize controlled thinking so that you're not bloating out your intuitions but you actually compute or you reason your way to an ends and then cognitive illusions do disappear they can disappear and so that's what motivated me to adopt that distinction as an essential distinction with that it seemed to resolve the controversy so far as i was concerned between a gerd gig renderer and ourselves and then there was a lot that you could do with that distinction and uh and eventually that became the core of my role 10 years later this is great so let's now let's just shift into like colleague mode of nerding out at a really deep level about this stuff um because my dissertation i was so ensconced in all this work i loved the system one system two distinction as well i read robots rebellion by keith stanovich and it blew my mind and i realized that um the field of intelligence research had completely ignored this distinction um it had treated it had it never even like dawned on intelligence researchers in a hundred years to to to think that maybe we should call some of these system one processes intelligence you know so this was this is so i i don't even know where i'm coming from i i i was just totally scotched in this work um and then started to do some research on uh to see if there are individual differences in an intuitive unconscious system of intelligence of system one and then when i was digging into this research i started getting to all the debates so some people argue that the word system is not correct some people say well we should call it types so some research said there's it's really type one processes versus type two processes because it's a lot of different types of processes under a an overall umbrella right you have within system one you can have things as uh varied from uh language learning to social cue learning to um aesthetic um intuition to et cetera et cetera et cetera yeah there's a whole wide range of things that we're labeling them all under or the same just like it's all this system one and then with system two you have a whole potpourri of different forms of rationality you know keistanovic as he's gone through uh quite sensibly and uh all through different types of uh different uh um ways that uh you know we can write you know use the rationality use our system to thinking to override intelligence yes so my question is you have you stayed up on these um these really uh these really nerdy debates and where are you do you see meredith kind of yeah i think it's a very important debate uh and clearly there is a tradition in psychology that you're not supposed to invoke communiculi a monk you lie being little people in the head whose behavior explains a person's behavior and system one and system two are homunculus so there's no question you know i i very deliberately in the book that i wrote thinking fast and slow i tried to get people to appreciate the personalities of system one and system now why did i do that and i explained that in the first pages that actually type 1 and type 2 is the proper terminology because there are broad types of mental activities but when you think of system 1 and system 2 you think of them as agents and the mind is specialized for thinking about agents and not about categories so agents have personalities agents have tendencies agents take action agents and goals and we're ready for that so it makes it easier to think about psychology when you think of those agents so type 1 and type 2 they call for lists and people are miserable with the lists what people are very good for very good at is finding routes roots in space you know path to go from one place to the other we're specialized for that and we specialize for thinking about agents lists are terrible and so that's that's why i went to that language quite deliberately i said those are fictions there are no systems in the brain it's just a way of talking but it's a very useful way of talking but but the people who are trying to criticize me on this i think they may have had a point because a couple of days ago i was talking to undergraduates at cornell who had questions about my book and they were speaking about system one and system two as if there were agents in their head they they were not thinking that this is an easy way of thinking about type one and type two which is what i intended but you know they were asking them what and what do system one and system two do in an infant you know in a dog or you know none of that was what i had really intended so to some extent there is a risk of of corrupting psychological thinking by bringing those among you like the risk is real the benefit is more real i agree i agree both the risk and the benefits and but you know you see people in in the general public talking about this and i notice that some people start to try to just as a shorthand map it on to brain systems some people actually map it on to like left brain versus right brain thinking and it that it makes my brain want to explode when i see that you know no it's not like you know that's the problem with you know talking about it as two discrete categories because then people think oh so all this system one stuff is here all the system two stuff is when there's such a ver very different process so yeah i i think it's just important as you do and i want to give you credit for for mentioning this in your book you know to kind of um to not to not try to essentialize it and not uh view them as agents but people will do it anyway in the general public who don't know all the nuanced uh you know nerdy literature but i think you know for professionals you use that language and it helps you think but you always remember that you can translate any anything that you say about system one or system two you can translate into a more cumbersome but more accurate formulation of type one and type two it's just easier to think about yeah for sure but um you just that you know the general idea and the robots rebellion uh the work um keith did um just opened up a portal into my whole thinking about fundamental issues of consciousness of free will you know i started to really think in grad school i thought i started to think does system two have more free will than system one you know even just that question i wanted to talk i wanted people to talk to me about it you know like um uh and um you know what what's some of your thinking on free will i mean i think we're probably both agreed that there's no magic free will there's no you know um we believe that you know in determinism to a certain degree but that there might still be a free will worth wanting and does that and if there is is there any hope for in system two or is there any hope for in system one uh you have found i think the wrong person to talk with fair enough well i have the same response to questions about free will and about consciousness i mean i know that people find them very exciting and somehow i don't and i don't because i don't know what it would look like i don't know what a solution would look like and to raise a problem when you have no idea of what you would consider to be a solution somehow isn't that is something that i'm not attracted to i understand that you know brilliant people many people people i respect are fascinated by these questions but somehow they don't speak to me and i can see obviously people feel their free will obviously you know the brain is is a physical object and with the rule of the throne and there seems to be a tension between this feeling but and all together it's a mystery you know how does feeling work in in a world of objects how does consciousness interact with object but obviously it's a puzzle but but it's a puzzle that i think we have no way of even approaching and knowing what it would be like to solve and for some reason i have that block that if i can't imagine a solution i don't want to go into the problem you know i really appreciate that and and and we certainly don't need to even go there to say things like some system two processes such as cognitive control and uh and uh and reasoning and problem solving give us uh more freedom of uh or more degrees of freedom voluntary i mean the basic distinction that i draw between system one operations and system two operations system one operations are things you do and says system two operations are things you do when system one operations happen to you so you know the that distinction if you is if you want to talk in terms of will of your will or control obviously system two is control and system one is not right as soon as you it is it's uncontroversial to use words like control and freedom as soon as you start seeing free will then the philosophers and and the people who who care about that get all mad [Laughter] because now you've you've entered their their realm of linguistics you know that no we're calling free will is determinate you know for magical free wilson from back going back to the big bang and it's like okay i'm sorry um yeah so um fair enough well well here's a topic i i think does interest you um because you uh reached out to me um about eight eight years ago or so i was so deeply touched i want you to know that it um i almost fell off my chair uh actually i was sitting on my bed when i read your email and they said at the end i got to the bottom sedan economy and i almost fell off my i can't believe i got an email out of the blue from dana.com but um but but it was it was in relation to my dissertation work on the fact that there may be individual differences in system one and um i'd love to talk to you about individual differences because i know it's not a topic that you've devoted your career to but i believe you said to me that if you could do a second career you might actually start to do some individual differences work is that right yeah i'm i'm actually working on individual differences these days so amazing let's talk about it late in life wonderful i belong to a team that is trying to understand the famous cognitive reflection test and the bat and ball problem must be familiar to all your listeners and trying to understand the battle problem and shane frederick who is the sort of the founder of that whole line of research he did that actually when he was a postdoc with me and we were writing a paper together which was the first effort to distinguish system one and system two that's where we introduced the notions of system one and system two and it's a key example of system one and system two because i saw a bat and a ball together cost a dollar ten the bat costs a dollar more than the ball how much the ball costs and you have an association and the association is ten cents and and you solve that problem as if you were said uh a dollar ten is a dollar more than ten cents that's that seems to happen now it turns out there are very interesting individual differences and some people fail that problem people they fail problems so they that's a lack of aptitude of one kind or another but there is an interesting class of people who fail that problem although they could easily solve it so 50 of harvard students say 10 cents now clearly if they bothered to check they would know that they made a mistake and almost all of them if they spent a minute or two would solve that problem the answer is five sense so what do we learn we learn they don't trick that is we learn that's just their system to accept the immediate association of system one and so there is that class of people who could solve the problem but don't and they're a very interesting group of people so they also tend to believe in conspiracy theories they tend to believe in of all kinds they are different from other intelligent people in multiple ways you know something i think that's worth bringing up here is seymour epstein's distinction between the experiential uh mind and the rational mind i had the great pleasure of um of having seymour epstein on my podcast um a couple years ago and uh he felt um quite frankly he felt as though um his dual process theory had not gotten as much attention as he wished it could have so out of honor to him um who he's no longer with us um i wanted to bring this up because i think there was a lot of uh merit in his work um at linking the experiential mind to superstition and to uh conspiracy theories and all sorts of things so yeah i want to hear some of your thoughts he had every reason to be upset with people including and certainly with me because i don't think i mentioned his work in thinking fast and slow and i certainly should have done because it was relevant it was creative but i actually did not know enough uh and i didn't think of including it so he was absolutely right he had he in fact i think had been there with that distinction which is one of those dichotomies that were that people were working on in the 80s and 90s had been there early i think before the system one system two distinction was was formed through and here's some brilliant examples of it get some beautiful examples of that that were similar to the kind of thing that there was versky and i had done that he attributed to the experiential mode of thinking so yes that is a regret i have which is uh not not doing more with his work in my book because he happened to be upset that's really that's incredibly gracious of you to to say that um i i formed like a friendship with him in the last couple years of his life and he actually uh asked me if i'd write the foreword to his to his book on uh on the summarizing his life's work so i i hope that i i honored it um he seemed to be happy with the with the forward so i i it just it made it made me happy to see him feel as though you know even because i think yeah i heard that he felt agreed uh and and i'm sorry about my part of this well that's incredible gracious view it's it's obviously not just it's not you it's it's a whole you know system a system like using the word system but um of uh there's so many proliferation of different dual process theories you know there's someone wrote a review um of like 40 to 50 different dual process theories you can't you know you can't to be fair to you for a second it's not like you know you can write about every single one and all the different nuance when you're writing a popular book you know so yeah no uh yeah so i i just adopted that to a minority in fact i described my interpretation of what those systems are i didn't try to do justice to the intellectual history of it but he really had made contributions that i you know if i had thought more carefully i could have included and i didn't beautiful um i i'm i'm touched by even your response to that um so yeah it's just like the individual differences aspects so they're the the this is this is the insight i had and i want you to tell me what you think of this in my dissertation um there just was so much of a focus on individual differences in system two i mean keistanovic it's all individual system two and he and key standards had a line in one of his papers where he said um individual different system one or minimal or just not even worth considering so i said i was like oh hell no you know i'm working my dissertation and this is what i wanted to directly challenge in my dissertation i feel like this area of individual differences in system one has really been long neglected in the field of cognitive science um you know i i found that that it they're implicit learning for instance your ability to probabilistically learn the rule structure of the very complex rule structure of the world was correlated almost zero with iq so you have people who are have conscious ability to detect patterns who aren't terribly necessarily good necessarily it's it's zero correlation so it can go either way um you know with um their ability to unconsciously detect complex patterns and i thought that was interesting do you what do you think well i think it is very interesting my the question that i was impressed by and i was thinking of system one slightly differently than than you did in my concern with individual differences when i approached you and this was for me system one is where we have representations of the world so that our model of the world is an associative memory and that for me is at the essence of system one and clearly some people have people are very different models of the world some of them are more accurate than others some are richer some are poor and there are all those individual differences in the representation of the world that people form and maintain and use to simulate the world or to make predictions about will happen to to generate explanations of what could happen so there must be individual differences in that and i i didn't find any adequate treatment of that aspect of the richness you're absolutely right that detecting patterns which is what you were focused on would be part of that general problem and i was interested in forming patterns makes a lot of sense i think i think part of the bias in the field is that is the field has a bias towards scientific reasoning as the pinnacle of human achievement and what bothered me is that arts achievement was really neglected and so what i wanted to do was open up this whole world to um individual differences in the experiential mind being linked to artistic and aesthetics and and so and it did so when i found these individual differences i found they were linked to opens to experience the personality trait which then opened up the whole world of creativity and and the arts and all these things that like you know um that i i feel like the judgment and reasoning literature is they're not terribly excited about they're not excited about this arts the arts you know do you know what i mean i think that's very interesting and yeah you're absolutely right it's it's very largely neglected in yeah and that whole tradition of work on thinking and reasoning and judgment and decision making uh it it really although it doesn't believe in logic as an explanation of psychology but it's infused with every it's a reaction to logic it's always logic is always there and the thing that you're talking about logic isn't even there and that's okay and that's okay there was such a bi i i felt like there was this meta bias in the bias literature towards um um like emotions are always that's well that's bad we got to control the emotions yeah i thank you absolutely but um thank you for having that that conversation because i've been wanting to kind of really nerd out with you at that level of specificity i'd like to take a moment to talk about a really cool podcast the addy hour podcast as we all know this past year has been really difficult from lockdowns to social isolation to racial injustice to political turmoil to lost lives and lost jobs we're all craving a major dose of life satisfaction connection and emotional health the addy hour podcast explores the topics and questions you've been thinking about and creates a unique space to talk about them dr knee addy yale professor and researcher mana faith sports and hip hop fan and mental health advocate and as guests explore a holistic approach to mental health today too often one-dimensional or dismissive approaches to mental health and emotional wellness prevent people from getting the help they need the atti hour podcast focuses on the intersection of brain science mental health faith culture and social justice through dynamic conversations with community leaders scientists and researchers professional athletes and entertainers faith leaders mental health experts and advocates you can listen to the addi hour podcast today on the apple podcast app spotify or your favorite podcast app okay now back to the show so let's move into hedonism or hedonic psychology let's move into hedonic psychology so that um is the work you started doing in the 90s um uh when you're kind of moving from judgment decision making to uh to this why how did you move into that area was it was it did ed diener influence you at all no no okay no i moved into that area because of the puzzle and the puzzle that that came up when emma and i were working on this on a theory of decision making that they published prospect theory which deals with the curvature of utility functions or value functions that that we don't respond linearly to amounts of money but that are response changes that is a difference of a hundred dollars makes a very big difference if you have a hundred dollars in terms of 200 but if you have 10 000 and it's ten thousand one hundred the difference is psychologically much smaller so there is that basic psychophysical fund but i posed the following puzzle i said suppose um you are supposed to get injections painful injections in the body one a day and and you don't habituate to that they are painful to the same degree now how much would you pay to reduce the number of injections from 12 to 2 and from 20 to 10 would you pay the same amount and the intuition is you wouldn't pay the same amount the intuition is you would pay more to reduce from 12 to 2 than from 20 to 10 because psychologically it's a bigger difference but that's ridiculous because the amount of pain that you're adding by by construction is the same so in both cases you're saving yourself 10 days of pain exactly the same enough so that turns out it turns out that the logic of thinking when you think about experiences doesn't fit the logic of when you think about making decisions and about numbers so that was the puzzle that led me into into studying experience so and that's another way of looking at the basic concept of utility in in economics and in sort of decision theory utilities inferred from choices from preferences but thinking of utility at the utility as an experience that was non-existent in the field i mean bentham had had those ideas centuries ago but in the field of decision-making that idea was absent and absent in economics so that's that's how i got to well that is really cool and uh and it just it just feels like the whole like there were a whole bunch of confluence of things of um that was like in the air because yeah a deaner started to soon after started studying life satisfaction as um even before or even before it wasn't okay you know edina had been in the field of well-being long time in the eighties in the 80s his entire career he's younger than i am but not by hold on um but yeah in the early 80s he had a classic review gotcha but i moved into experiences of episodes like you know an episode of a medical procedure an episode of watching a pleasant or unpleasant film that lasts a few minutes how do you evaluate experiences and from there i got to the study of well-being so that was the well it was an important bridge and it was an important distinction that it it's what allowed us to see this clear distinction between the experiential self and the remembered self you know ed diener's work seems to be the remember itself you're taking a self-report question in there and it's saying overall how happy are you with your life and you're trying to reflect back on it you know in a lot of ways you were kind of bringing some of the even like the mihai chick sent me high approach you know like you developed another one he did experience sampling but i believe you developed another technique to that was really cool by the way had that distinction uh he described well-being as being satisfied with your life having positive affect a lot of positive effect and very little negative effect so that was his concept i came to that distinction between the two completely independently really but ed had had it and like the entire field was focused on life satisfaction that is the measures the idea of measuring well-being by measuring experience that that was really largely absent now sixth and bihari had done experience sampling so he had studied that but it was not perceived as a measure of well-being it was not and and that's that's where the work that we did came in this is great thank you for helping like talk me through so i get all the timelines right i wanted to get it right i wanted to get right so that makes a lot of sense to me okay then martin selgman he comes into the picture okay so 1998 he starts this field positive psychologies so do you you've had some criticisms of the field of positive psychology i'd love to hear what some of your current uh thinking is uh because i because i do think the field has evolved i think the field did start out mostly focused on happiness and um uh and and subjective well-being um but has now uh expanded you have researchers studying meaning the science of meaning uh the connections you know um very various you know multi-dimensional aspects of the of the overall well-being construct so so i'm wondering where you are today and your your own thinking about the feeling so i was interested in the fact that there are those two definitions of happiness i mean one of them is life satisfaction and the other is the average level of affect in your experience and and actually you can measure them independently without going into detail and they depend on different things so the quality of experience the average quality of your experience really depends primarily on on social context and on love and on how much time you spend with people you love and that's those are the things that determine emotional happiness life satisfaction is determined much more conventionally by success by how much you achieve relative to and that's income and education and prestige and they contribute and and sort of living a conventionally successful life that is to be married to have children not to be divorced not not to be involved in litigation stuff like that that's life satisfaction so i was interested in that distinction which is not the same distinction as between meaning and well-being so that's right so i'm i never did much with the meaning of life and see in a way it's related to the issue of consciousness that we were talking about it didn't speak to me but the main uh that is when i was thinking because i started out interested in experience that the meaning of life is part of life satisfaction which i thought was secondary and now several people uh including paul dolan in the uk who was my postdoc have tried with some success i think limited success to to say that people have experience of meaning in real time and that's an interesting issue my focus on this and what happened to me first was that i thought that experience is really the definition of well-being and that what people think about their lives doesn't you know that's an epic phenomenon secondary it turned out that i couldn't be right because what people want in their life the decisions they make have very little to do with how happy they're going to be they're searching for life satisfaction so to have a definition of well-being that doesn't correspond to what people want for themselves that wasn't the big success so i went i just gave up on that so that's one and the other criticism i have of the whole well-being movement in that it's really diametrically opposed in some sense to seligman's point i think there isn't enough focus on misery that is all and i think that as a social objective for society uh the maximization of well-being is secondary but minimizing suffering is an objective that we can all agree on and as an objective for policy uh instead of setting happiness as a measure of policy setting the reduction of misery as a objective for policy would result in very different activities and i think you know ethically it's the right thing to do but so that's my my response to the current recession so first of all how do you define suffering let me just ask you that question like what do you even uh how do you even operationalize such a thing well uh we that there are various ways so the obvious way is experience sampling where you periodically you know you you bring people on their on their phone today and to ask them to answer a few questions about how they feel right now and about what they are doing we developed a technique that we call the day reconstruction method which is that at the end of the day you sort of recreate the story of your day in episodes and you evaluate the emotional tone and you describe the emotions associated with each episode and then you can get an integral of the emotions so you can talk about the average emotion over the day for individuals that's that's how you can operationalize it now suffering is relatively easy to define because you say of people that they suffer when they're in a state that they would want to escape so that is operationally much easier to define than happiness i mean it's it's wanting to it's wanting this to end oh i want to avoid this i want to escape this that's suffering for me and it's well defined and it's it turns out that you know if you sample in the united states so we did the same thing in france the when you look at a lot of people and take the average over time you know 10 15 of the of the overall time of the population is spent in a negative emotional state and and that is very unevenly distributed in the population a minority of people do most of the suffering until illness is associated with it poverty extreme poverty is associated with it so there are categories of people who do most of the suffering and most of the rest of us suffer relatively little we vary in how happy we are and you know but that's that's genetically determined optimism but uh the there it's easy to measure suffering yeah i appreciate that clarification um i i have made the point to marty uh as as people in his orbit call him you know martin selgman we call marty um i because i worked with him closely for f did you know that i ended up working with him five for five years after we met in new york i ran something called the imagination institute with him um but anyway um i have i have made the point often that that one what one needs is not just learned hopefulness they need real hope like you can't just focus on psychological hope as the intervention and and ignore the fact that people need to have you know if you're languishing in poverty and there's not much cues of hope in your environment we need to work on that too so i i definitely agree yeah yeah i mean that's been a very significant criticism i think of positive psychology which is that in a deep sense it's a very conservative approach that is you you want to change the way that people feel about their lives but that means you're not trying to change their lives and that's the point that you were making right now i think that you you want to change people's lives and not own hp yes but but i'm going to add a butt here because i think i'm going to try to argue as well there's still value to that research and and to the field of positive psychology um that uh couldn't one make the case that um that that that those who getting them above the zero line is that that will rise the tide for for humanity you know in in a way an analogous argument and debate is happening in the gifted education field in education so you could i think perhaps extrapolate your argument to the to that field and say well we really should focus um all of our resources on remediation on helping the students who are most poor uh poor uh and and those who lack educational opportunities um but couldn't one argue that um that it's a false dichotomy that we should be helping both because you know we don't want those who are gifted you know students to fall between the cracks either because they're ultimately going to rise the tide for all of humanity is it what do you what do you make of that well i think it's i think it's a false dichotomy and it's a false analogy fair enough because education is a resource that we're supplying and the question is who are we supplying it to now happiness is not the resource that we're supplying i mean it's not that society is distributing happiness so we people are living their lives and and objectively and the question is how much and what resources and what focus we want to put on improving the way people feel about their lives or in actually reducing suffering now it's not that i'm against uh you know some of my best friends are positive psychologists so i'm not i'm not against positive psychology one of my heroes is richard layered in the uk oh wow that would make him feel really good to know i'm going to tell him that you just called him one of your heroes yeah maybe he knows that we're friends actually i i mean he gives me credit for his career in well-being because he became interested in well-being because of me and i pointed him to he actually came to princeton to think about being i did not know that um so yeah and i know that you're not uh against the field of positive psychology um there's also you know there's just a lot of nuances here that um my brain's just going off in lots of different directions so there's also an an interesting distinction to be made an important distinction to made between the science of well-being and the application of the science of well-being so certainly you have no issue with a good rigorous science of well-being right yeah and uh and and it is possible and i think this is what richard laird is is doing specifically in the uk uh he he has he has interventions to improve happiness and but but i think measurement is in the background it's it's going to be evidence-based and his major contribution to well-being uh has been a massive effort to provide cognitive behavioral therapy in law large government budgets he's a member of the house of lords and he started at that movement there and had a lot of influence on both labour and conservative uh and increased together with professor clark from oxford the clinical psychologist that really changed the face of cognitive behavior therapy and greatly improved it and all of that is very strictly evidence-based and so it you can do rigorous applied psychology and be um i actually want to tell you about a paper that i wrote with uh my colleagues fallon goodman actually she was the lead author found goodman david desbotto and todd cashton what we wanted to do is we wanted to look because i think a lot of this is a measurement issue um we saw a problem with self-report within the field we wanted to see what is the weight and was the correlation between subjective well-being measure you know just simply how satisfied with your life and the latent factor of all these other kinds of tests of facets of well-being that have been developed like meaning and positive relationships and all we found at 0.98 correlation but i'll send you the paper a 0.98 correlation between um you know the the standard subjective well-being measure a couple items and a very very comprehensive a very comprehensive battery a multi-dimensional of well-being um i think it's very very hard in this field to rely on self-report and and um because of a lot of issues you've pointed out in your own career of retrospective um thinking what you do when you take one of these questionnaires is you tend to think um you know if you're in a good mood or you tend to have a good positive evaluation of your life you tend to on average say oh yeah everything's good you know positive relationships are good oh yeah i've got meaning too oh yeah i got you know and it's so it's hard it's really hard statistically to separate out a lot of things that we conceptually say are very clear distinctions like meaning and positive emotions but um anyway we we just we think there's some real mythological issues here i mean you know what what you're going to do when you extract a single factor from many measures you are going to extract a single factor and that single factor could very well correspond to life satisfaction but it's the same as an intelligence you have many tests you can extract a single factor and there's still varieties of intelligence numerical spatial vocabulary so the fact that you can extract a single dominant factor and find a good measure for it really does not exclude the possibility i think that that you could also find discriminations well i think yeah just to add a little further nuance to what we found i mean with the weight with structural modeling as you know you can look at different models and what i think is interesting is that like the one factor model um of of all these disparate things was a better fit than some than parsing them out you know in other various ways uh i haven't seen your paper i i would just say that there is a fair amount of research i think that indicates that uh different circumstances and different personality types are associated with different emotions and so some people are angry and other people are depressed and they're both negative states but trying to pull them into one factor you will not deny the difference between you will not deny the difference between joy and contentment because there clearly is a difference between pleasure and contentment and between anxiety and depression or anxiety and anger so there are there are varieties of feelings associated and most of them are clearly positive or negative but but but they're but but they are multi-dimensional so for sure for sure i i don't want to argue they're not multi-dimensional but i think it's harder to get at it with these self-report questionnaires i guess is the point where you're you're doing a retrospective evaluation well we need to i think we need more of your kind of techniques of moment-to-moment sampling of these various things you know there is research indicating you know i uh after stone of the usc with whom i collaborated 20 years ago in the study of well-being he's a master in the study of experienced sampling and he was one of those who developed the day reconstruction method which is retrospective and and he had good results indicating that actually uh you capture experience quite well if by retrospective judgments of experience at the end of the day really yeah but there's a lot of evidence for that so the that if you focus people on on their emotional experience so they remember them i mean not perfectly you know there are distortions but on the average they remember them what is very different is when i ask you for a general evaluation of your life you are going to do something entirely different you are going to look at your life and compare it to other people's life lives okay you're not going to to analyze your emotional experiences that's really interesting a lot of this research is asking you on your whole thinking about your whole life you know what is your meaning what is your positive experiences and no it's really super interesting um the the wealth and happiness link is another very very interesting one and and you had published research showing that above about a 75 a thousand per year income um these the the uh it splits off so um you don't see much more return on your investment in terms of the experience um but you do see you still see an increase in life satisfaction is that the basic finding yeah i mean that gallup uh has been studying well-being since the early 2000s i was a consultant with them and i was actually instrumental in their adding questions about affect and about emotion to their questionnaire so that then they have a measure that allows you that they also have a general measure of life satisfaction the the ladder of life so-called which is essentially life satisfaction so they have both and and we studied and they had both dino was a consultant with them i was a consultant with them that's that's how it it began and in the gallup data it's absolutely clear that when you look at experience then in the united states about about 75 000 it really flattens i mean we angus deaton the economist famous economist thinkers nathan and i did that study where we found absolutely no increase in emotional satisfaction beyond 70 75 000 uh i think there have been data that find a slight increase but it's clear that there is some inflection and that the curve for life satisfaction is diff and steeper and that life satisfaction continues increasing beyond that now there has been a study recently by killingsworth which shows using different techniques and so on which seems to show or shows that emotions keep improving with income so we have two discrepant results there's no question that our result is solid and replicable and there is no real explanation so far of the discrepancy that is what happened is that killing's worth is more recent i mean this is this is something that happens all the time in psychology and social sciences the more recent paper uh is assumed to do justice to everything that happened before it so [Music] and killingsworth interpretation of why his results are different from ours is of course it blames our research and said that our research was inadequate but in fact uh it's perfectly clear that i think his explanation of the discrepancy doesn't hold water and i have no idea what the explain what the true explanation is so we'll have to look at it more closely but i'm really curious yeah i want to see how that gets resolved so am i i mean i'm sure there is an answer and i'm pretty sure we'll find it but we don't know yet yeah i i feel like regardless of whatever the veracity of that turns out to be there still is a deeper truth which is how one spends one's money and one's time is going to be a better predictor of one's happiness than the specific money that you have above a certain point isn't that fair to say that is certainly fair to say that how you spend your time so that that is a direct implication of thinking about emotion is that whether you spend your time commuting or with your children it makes a big difference your emotional happiness over a day i mean you know you have two days that you could two hours each day that you could spend this way or that way it makes a big difference so that's undoubtedly the case yeah i would love to talk about your new book noise okay um what in the world is the difference between bias and noise and why is noise rarely recognized in conversations about human error well when you think of measurements using a ruler to measure a line if you make multiple measurements they will not be accurate and they will vary they will not be the same from time to time the average error is the bias and the very and the variability is noise and so there are and clearly that both sources of inaccuracy because if bias is zero but measurements are all over the place they're just on average they're correct they're still not accurate now there is a way of measuring error of measuring accuracy which is accepted in all the sciences actually it's been around for like since the beginning of the 19th century it's associated with with frederick gauss and and there is that measure particular measure in that measure the total measure of error is the square of the bias and the square of the noise where noise is measured by the standard deviation so in a theory of error which is the accepted theory bias and noise have equivalent roles the average error and the standard deviation of air this is something that people really don't think about now it's natural for people to think of bias because bias is an error i mean it's it represents something you can imagine what it is variability is much much harder to represent and much harder to think about and much harder to realize the role of variability in inaccuracy so that's bias and noise now where do you find noise because it's a very abstract thing if you look at judges looking at the same case their sentences will actually be all over the place and the standard deviation in one of the studies with the average sentence was seven years the standard deviation was 3.8 that means that a defendant faces a lottery depending on which judge would be assigned that is unacceptable there is noise in medicine there is noise in [Music] the evaluation of assets there is noise in the assignment of children to foster care there is noise in in patterns so there is noise everywhere so those are differences that should not exist that's variability that should not exist in those systems in addition there is variability within the individual that is the same judge will not give the same sentence depending on temperature sentences are harsher on hot days people assign heavier sentences the day after their football team loses so that's that's noise within a judge anyway that's noise and that's what all us maybe some book is about written with two collaborators it's it's fascinating and i'm trying to wrap my head around um this with like iq testing and you want the signal is you know the true iq score and you never ever know the true iq score you only have like a r you have a range of of in your ev help you know you've confidence intervals you know um how can you um and there are lots of demands you talk about in there but i am really curious in double clicking on in uh in personnel selection and kind of the use of these standardized tests as well in for college selection do you do you see a lot of noise in college admissions well there's a lot of noise in colleges missions yeah there's a lot of noise in hiring i mean that's well known there's a lot of noise in personnel evaluation i mean the conclusion in studies of the evaluations that employees get is that the ratings they get the ratings are more predictable you can predict ratings better if you know who did the rating than if you know who the ray t is so that's problematic nor is this generally problematic and frequently completely ignored it's assumed a way you're right so um not that you need me to say you're right but you're right you're right yeah this is important this is important yeah i need people to say i'm right on this one no it's so important um where let's talk about um how this relates to um the uh proliferation of diversity and inclusion initiatives in um hiring practices because they're focused on reducing bias right but how could they benefit perhaps from also considering uh noise have you thought about that it turns out that the major source of error in many decisions is actually noise and not biased so for example you have bail judges who decide whether to keep somebody incarcerated or release them before trial and clearly you want to minimize crime and clearly you want to minimize unnecessary incarceration of people and but it turns out when you look at it carefully there are huge differences between judges in who they release and who they don't so there have been large-scale studies with hundreds of thousands of decisions by thousands of judges which make it very clear that a defendant facing a bail decision is facing a lottery as that depends a lot on you know who the judge is and because different judges have different tastes about who should get there from the point of view of an organization suppose you have an organization that is doing hiring now if there is a bias then then of course there will be errors but suppose there is no overall bias suppose you have an organization that is where half of the people who make hiring decisions are biased in favor of women and half are biased against them so overall there is no bias but clearly something is wrong with with that organization and what's wrong is noise so there is real bias at the individual level and sometimes at the organizational level and and bias at the individual level when the when there are differences between individuals creates noise i see and there is a lot of that yeah so a different way of framing it um i really like this um well bias is obviously we're both agreed very very important to address and to become aware of but in some ways bias can be almost easier to see um and as a problem then noise can be yeah yeah i think that's what we're saying yeah i get it i get it i love it um i'm so glad that you that you you put pointed a finger at it um so you talk about ways of trying to make this um ways of reducing noise you talk about decision hygiene um what are some examples of decision hygiene well uh first of all the concept of hygiene and what it's and the idea was to distinguish a gene from medication or vaccination that is when you're medicating or vaccinating or doing surgery you're dealing with a specific illness and you're trying to combat a specific illness when you wash your hands you don't know which germs you're protecting yourself from that's hygiene so and if you're successful you will never know because you won't get the disease so there is a whole category of steps and procedures that you are more likely to think about when you think about hygiene when you think about then about noise really and reducing noise then you think when you're trying to minimize bias so and an example of hygiene is that when i we started with when i was describing my work in the israeli army that is when you have a decision problem instead of trying to develop an intuition about the problem as a whole breaking up the problem in two segments evaluating each segment in a fact-based way and then having a global evaluation which can be intuitive that is hygiene that's an improvement that will reduce noise reduce bias and improve decisions and there are other steps that belong to the surgeon iv like making judgments comparative so people are we're not very good at making absolute judgments for good something is or how much money something is worth we're much better at making comparative judgment that this candidate is better than that candidate or this object is worth more than that object so you get much less noise and much higher accuracy in relative judgment than an absolute joke so trying to switch people to make comparative judgments and providing them with comparative scale that are easy to use that's decision that's a step in decision hygiene and we have a few more and all this falls on the umbrella of you know a a noise audit that's i like this idea of a noise audit that you go to a workplace and maybe they'll have noise audit consultants or something someday you know that that could be a new field where you go in and uh armed roles yeah all these principles um i found the quote that i really liked to illustrate the point we were just talking to about before you said bias has a kind of explanatory charisma which noise lacks i love that quote i love it yeah because it's so true a lot of people are talking about bias right now but i just i don't i don't see noise as much on the on the radar that's right and and the omission is so obvious that we wanted to to do something about it that's when the book formed wonderful you know how have you uh just a general couple general questions about your life uh you know you know how do you think you've grown over the course of your life you know i i saw an interview did with sam harris he asked you if studying uh biases your whole life has made you less biased and you said no not really you said not really but it but there are there are other dimensions to oneself than their cognitive biases you know as a whole person how do you think you've grown in your life well when you train you develop some wisdom and and the the wisdom is that the number of things that you get very excited about diminishes and that that you look at things from a greater distance and with somewhat more objectivity and those things happen with age i mean it's not it's just if you live long enough and you don't lose your marbles completely this will happen to you this is you know it's it's growth in a certain sense but it also it's because when you grow old you also become detached and you're less part of the action and you're less involved and you're less relevant and all that enables you to to be wise and detected so it's not all growth you know as a very good thing it's also that you are moving from the center of the action and this is inevitable and with the cognitive biases in particular um you know are there any are there any that you feel like you've really uh you've really moved move the dial on um uh throughout the course of your uh career of those yeah i mean there are a few cognitive biases that uh you can sometimes be aware of that oh i'm i'm being anchored you know somebody is giving me that number and that number is affecting my thinking uh but by and large it's very difficult when you are just making a mistake to become aware that you're making a mistake that really doesn't come naturally certainly doesn't come naturally to me it's an amazing testament um to your humility to uh to spend to win the nobel prize over this and to admit that you still have some of these biases yourself and it makes me it inspires me in a way and it also makes me feel hopeless as well i think the latter is appropriate um i mean i have a question just about winning the nobel prize in what way did winning nobel prize increase your happiness in life oh you know in multiple ways i mean but i would tell you something that people don't realize i mean the experience of winning that prize i mean the thing that's most strange about that experience is how much pleasure it gives to other people so anybody who likes you right no no they don't have to like you anybody who is connected to you feels some pleasure and you know this is totally unjustified i mean there is no logic behind doesn't matter but the fact is that this is an association and people in many other domains many other successes that you have other people are going to grudge you to begrudge you or there's going to be some envy for some reason the nobel prize is not one of them at least maybe among your colleagues but not certainly not among people so that was a major thing during the first year when i was really conscious of that with so much pleasure this was giving to everybody around me that that in itself is a sort of great happiness is that you feel you are sort of uh that people are happy you're making people happy by something that is happening to you your mother your mother will tell everyone about it yeah but danny my son danny got the nobel prize she wasn't around and uh but but you know neighbors would say i mean and so that's part of it that's really what i hadn't anticipated this but and it's long traded but uh the initial experience that was very senior and and in general it certainly improves life i mean i recommend it to everybody it's not uh you know your credibility increases people people and you get more access to resources but you mainly and you're taking more seriously than you deserve to be taken a lot of good things happen and and there isn't much downside if you don't let it sort of dominate your life if you let it dominate your life it's not good but it will not only dominate your life i mean what ex overconfidence could also be a problem to what extent did it did it increase your confidence um were you ever insecure before winning the nobel prize um did it make you feel more confident yeah oh yeah i mean i i think uh i once heard somebody describe the experience of being knighted and uh and he had a phrase that really impressed me said you don't sweat the small stuff uh that something happens that gives you a different perspective so it really is a matter of luck but when when that thing happens to you it really changes your life for the better feels quite unfair i feel like everyone should be able to win the nobel prize at some point in their life to uh to increase their their well-being and yeah um so you know what advice okay well this is the question i was if you were if you were just starting out in the field right now today you're you're fresh out of grad school what topic or area would you be most excited to uh spend your career studying or i think today i would go either in brain science into brain science or into artificial intelligence that's that's where i would go because at the moment that's that's where a lot of exciting things seem to be happening totally and and there's a whole fascinating literature on bias in algorithms and uh that's a whole other topic but you know what i mean that's if you could apply your yeah work to that area um what do you see as the next era of behavioral economics and behavioral science i have i have a room against forecasting i just don't believe people can do it and uh you know i can say trivial things about what is happening now and which is likely to remain slow over the next four or five years but uh i nobody can predict what will happen and those who tell you they can are just eluding themselves hey that's an answer in itself so fair enough yeah fair enough um i'm sure you get asked this one all the time but you know what do you what do you think or what do you want your grace legacy to be i think i don't uh you know i don't spend much time thinking about it uh i'm i'm pleased right now that i think in you know right now i think that i would like the idea of noise to capture on uh i would have liked adversarial collaboration to catch i think that the way that we conduct controversies is ridiculous and uh and something should be done to you know what we were talking about with that study of well-being where we're getting somebody's getting different results this is really not a way to conduct science i mean to have somebody and then no contact you just and that happens all the time instead of people saying oh look i mean i have a result that doesn't seem to fit yours let's let's compare notes let's see let's talk uh what you get is very adversarial and and i so i had that idea of adversarial collaboration and i don't think it's going to it hasn't had much impact but i wish i loved that i wish i saw that more in congress for instance you know that's a different story i know but yeah but i i wish we just saw that in various different aspects someone's life so do you do you have grandchildren yes you know what advice do you give them about you know living in this world moving forward in the kind of world we're living in today and next hundred years what do you have like any general sort of wisdom no of course not i mean you know i wouldn't i wouldn't dare give advice to my grandchildren i mean uh all right you know i can give them advice about how to navigate [Music] if that's too broad a question i can narrow it and say what if what about to aspiring psychologists you know what advice do you have to young uh psychologists or going to the field yeah just general advice for them well i mean you know when i i think that not getting too attached to your ideas is really an important piece of advice that you have a lot of people getting attached to mediocre ideas instead of looking for better ones that's that i think and being willing to move if things don't work and just not not getting stuck uh that would be my advice but also consider whether this is the life for you that is academic life has you know it has its its advantages its benefits and its costs and it's much more suitable for some personalities than for others and it would be good advice for some people just don't do this because you're not going to be happy and you're not going to be as productive as you could be so that's that i think you know i i think i wrote that in thinking fast and slow but it's that in order to be a scientist a successful scientist you have to be able to exaggerate the importance of what you're doing if you if you cannot exaggerate the importance of what you're involved in you will feel futile and and you can see that and in order to be passionate about what you're doing you have to to think that this is the most interesting thing in the whole universe so at least i'm exaggerating now but you have to view it as bigger than it really is and uh not everybody has that characteristic and some people have it too much but that's a different story um is there a study that you um uh wish you had done and didn't do you're like wow i wish i did this study well i mean you know i constantly have that when i read experiments by other people you know when i'm very impressed but you know i wish but i guess i'm more a study that hasn't been done yet but you're like oh huh you know if i had the resources if i had yeah oh you know there must have been i i don't remember that it's not the thing that i have stored that i have that regret i've got to study it should have done and no so this is my last question um you know the evaluation of one's life and their satisfaction can you just give me a you know just think about your life and give me just a retrospective uh reflection on overall have you been happy satisfied uh content et cetera well i mean you know i view myself as having been extraordinarily lucky so i was you know i was lucky i i didn't you know we spoke about the war that i had in europe and so on but i was lucky i mean i survived and i i didn't really suffer hunger or torture so i was lucky then and i've been lucky all my life i've been mainly lucky in the friends i've had and in the collaborations so that's that's made my life my all my work has been social and and i've enjoyed every part of it so it's yeah that's my main evaluation i'm i've been very fortunate thank you so much danny for this wonderful chat today and for being so inspiring to so many of us in the field of psychology as well as the broader public and your humility your graciousness um your intellect um and uh and your humanity thank you so much for being on the psychology podcast today thank you scott you embarrassed me but i forgive you see you bye don't stop there where did i embarrass you at what point by all this praise oh my gosh i gotcha well i i um i hear you i i really do mean it from the bottom my heart so thanks again thank you bye-bye thanks for listening to this episode of the psychology podcast if you'd like to react in some way to something you heard i encourage you to join in on the discussion at the psychologypodcast.com that's the psychologypodcast.com thanks for being such a great supporter of the show and tune in next time for more on the mind brain behavior and creativity

Channel: The Psychology Podcast

Views: 15,333

Keywords: psychology, podcast, Scott Barry Kaufman

Id: PbxrkVlXmB4

Length: 118min 21sec (7101 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 15 2021