Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is part of the best of series, where we highlight some of the most exciting and enthralling and enlightening episodes from the archives of the Psychology Podcast. Enjoy today. It's great to chat with Daniel Kahneman. One of the most influential psychologists of all time. Cooman is known for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the two
thousand and two 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 Off, Wall and Judgment. In twenty thirteen, Codoman received the Presidential Medal Freedom from Barack Obama. Daniel is so great to chat with you today.
It's a pleasure to be here.
I'm so excited to chat with you. You are such a legend in the field, as you know, and there's so much 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 think your personal story and sort of where you're born and what you live through is utterly fascinating and and just like a one of a kind kind
of experience. So you were born in Tel Aviv, but you spend most of your childhood in Paris when it was occupied by Nazi Germany in nineteen forty that's is that right?
That's correct.
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 due to the intervention of his employer. Do you recall could you do have that memory in your head of like visiting that that concentration camp or visiting where he was imprisoned.
Yeah, I have a very vivid memory, so you know it 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 I've kept. I've also kept the image of my father when he was released. By the way, the story of his release is an interesting one because 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 cloud 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 paint was amazing.
And when he came back, he was skinned, 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. 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, and but he weighed forty five kilo, which forty five kilos would be about one hundred pounds actually exactly one hundred 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 that image he is the one who opened the door. 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 six pm, Jews couldn't leave the house. And you were staying late at a friend's house and you were coming home after then 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 ans soldier. He was wearing a black uniform. And I was seven at the time, but I knew that they were the worst of the worst. And we were walking about to meet I actually went a few years back. I went, and I checked my memory of what the street looked like, and I found the exact
spot where where this had happened. But and you know, we walked forward 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 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, I remember quick, vividly.
And your mom had told you that that humans are endlessly complicated and fascinating, and that certainly dovetails with your mom's wisdom there.
Yeah, I mean that that I really remember, because it is true that 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 his character, and it was always complicated. And I remember thinking that this is really complicated in hearing this many which just soon killed me. But he has a little boy just like me, and he has emotions just like my father, and.
So yeah, this is the you know, the start of seeing the complexity of human psychology there in such a remarkable way. So when France was liberated, so he moved around, you know, when your father came back kind of kind of on the.
Round to escape, 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 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 nineteen forty two when I was eight, and that's where we spent the rest of them and then the Germans walled into that area when the Allies
were threatening invasion, 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 for me, a converted chicken next to a cafe in a small village in the well of France and nearly Moorish. And that's where my father died, and that's where we were. He died six weeks before full d Day, before the Allies Invada Europe, and 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 just 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 grandma telling me because she escaped the Pagrams in Russia, and I remember her telling me how she hid in a wagon and went from 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, I mean when one of the thoughts that I remember having, it was and the sister was nine years older than I was, so I was nine, she was eighteen, 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, I mean, they just try to survive another day.
And that was very an important part actually of my identity, and that made living in Israel, moving to Israel very a 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, it can be strong. And during the war, the main thing that you know, I was it 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, yeah, 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 different experiences, But I really do not race anything that happened to me to those years.
Mhm. Fascinating. I guess we don't. We won't. We can't do the experiment. But it must have. Yeah, it very lea shaped your interest in human psychology.
Yeah, it probably did. Yeah. Yeah.
So Francis liberated and in nineteen forty six the family moved to Palestine. This this is this is pre Israel. This is this is this is at the birth. We're literally at the birth of a nation. Right, you know what was it? It wasn't called Palestine. It was called the British Mandatory Palestine, right or something like that. Yeah, yeah, what my own 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. Well, I remember we moved there in nineteen forty six, and in nineteen forty seven there was a UN declaration that allowed the state, Jurish state to exist, and I remember dancing in the streets. I was thirteen then, and and the war began. As soon as the British retreated, the 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. The casualty level was huge, 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 nineteen forty nine, it was you know, it was a new country and it was still very new when I went into the Armia where well, I don't know, if you want anything, to go.
Into battle, yeah, going to it, going to it.
Well, so everything was really new, and you know, everything had to be improvised, from uniforms to to rule regulations, what have you. I went I was seventeen when I graduated from high school, and there was a special unit of the Israeli Army that was called the Academic Reserve, where it was the equivalent of our OTC, but where you well, went through officer training during the summers, but went to university and I studied psychology and mathematics, and
in nineteen fifty four 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 psychologist, and as with a BA in psychology, I were the best trained psychologists in the Israeli Army. I mean, there was my direct commander. I was in a research unit
and my direct commander with a chemist. His train had been in chemistry, absolutely a brilliant man, and we were doing things that 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 got a copy of the report that I wrote in nineteen fifty six. It's fined by Lieutenant Khanama 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 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 nineteen fifty six. So that's this is surely an unusual and very fortunate experience because the idea of the interview I had read a book by Paul me I mean, 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 before a mental image of your patient, of your patient or the recruit, whoever. It is the system that existed in Israeli only when it was a clinical interview where people had to interview recruits and decided how
fit they were for combat. 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 Meil 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 that was the interview. And there were interviews. I was like twenty two at the time and they were twenty, but you know I was. I was in charge, 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 I remember one of them saying, you're turning us into robots. That is because I you know, there were questions. It was a semi structured interview. There was a list of questions about each of several traits, like how punctual you were, sociable you were. I had one that was called masculine pride, which today you wouldn't want to use that term, but at the time it seemed very fitting.
And so I told them, uh, you know, I realized that the morale was at state that 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 is sober will 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 for various criteria like being sent to of his training or going to drail or different things that could happen to a soldier, and that the interview was had really significant polility. I mean, it was a big improvement what had happened before. But what was quite remarkable in the results with 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 with the average of the average of the six ratings and the final rating. Because that's what 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 judgements and the surface and break the problem great each aspect of the problem, independently, delay intuition, then look at the profile of your ratings and following your judgment. So that stayed with me evidently for over sixty years.
That's incredible. So the start of your psychology career in a way showed you that there is a then intuition can be spot on.
Yeah, you know.
That's that's that's really uh, that's that's really cool. And then we're gonna we're gonna get to that later, the intelligence of intuition for sure. So just to kind of wrap up this early part of your life, after you got your then you went and got a PhD right from Berkeley, and your dissertation was advised by Susan Irvin and examined relations between adjectives and the semantic differential. And also you got a chance to do Fortron programming. I
think that you. I think you enjoyed it. I remember Pascal, I think with programming in my childhood, but even before Pascal was Fortron, right, so that was even before my before Tron was the.
Very first language that was accessible to non programmers. It was a compiled 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 Fortramp was given at my nineteen sixty. It lasted a week and that's where I learned Fortran one, which was really that's when it that's when it began.
It's the beginning, that's the beginning my.
Thesis program, which so I spent most of the effort was programming. It could take twenty 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 I could tell whether the program was working by whether the
tapes were working in the proper sequence. Just think of what it was then that with the Berkeley mainframe, the main computer at 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 definitely have come a long way. It'll be interesting to see where it is, like sixty years from now, if it's going to be the same exponential rate. So your early work focused on visual perception and attention. Your first post was at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in nineteen sixty one. 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 everyone in cognitive science peach that you start with that, you know, I feel like, and then how did you move into judgment decision making. I believe that was when you when you met U Tavski, right, yeah, I.
Mean Amastrski was a young colleague of mine at tab University, were 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 that sweminar 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 Intuitists Decisions, and the conclusion of that study was people are pretty good intuitive statisticerence.
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 intuitive statisticians. So I knew this was wrong. And Israelis have a style of debating that is world famous. It's quite merciless, and so I engaged mostly in that debate in front of the class, and it turned out to be a very
good conversation. I think I want that debate because that's what started our joint work, which was basically questioning into it statistics. So that's and then we became very close friends and.
The rest is history, so to speak.
Yeah, in a way, I mean, it turned out that this was a very important friendship. We dominated our lives for you know, ten twelve years. We spent hours every day together a 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 we had 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. And Amoson really extraordinary sense of humor, and he loved laughing, and he made me laugh and he made me he improved my sense of humor, so I made him laugh. We left a lot, and that was very happy.
It's beautiful. So let me just get this straight. So when you're in this meeting and you challenged him a little bit about the positive aspects of intuition, was were you drawing in your intuition to say that intuition isn't as positive as he's made it out to be or were you basing it on some other conclusion.
The conclusion of that Michigan research whether that people are essentially basian, which means that they make corrected from data, except that they are conservative basian, that is, they do not they do not draw enough from information. And I said, this is absurd in fact, and I cited something that they attributed to Denny Kay, who was then a very famous comedian. Very little of him remains, but he had described a person as a woman, and that's what I remember.
Turned out later that I mystery remembered 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 this idea that people jump to conclusions is, you know, when 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 Baysian that it made that idea seem silly. I think anyway, I
still think so not everybody in reason. Well, that's that's what set us up.
I love it. You know, you talk about the importance of adversarial you called adversarial collaboration. Now, what a perfect example of a situation where you formed such a warm friendship with someone. Well, this was you know, it wasn't that adversarial. It wasn't adversar. Yeah, that's fair enough, that's fair.
That's from the beginning.
Well, maybe Gary Kleine fits more into that that that situation, so we can we can talk about Gary Klein a second. So this is a research that he had. Gary Klin had been spending his career basically studying expertise intuition 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 two 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 it's a fairly complicated story I had. You know, as I told you, I had always believed that that there is own marvels to intuition. So I'd never believed that that there is nothing to it. Uh, And in fact I had I remember that they have reviewed an early grant application by Gary and which I had reviewed favorably when I was still in Jerusalem, very long time ago. Uh, and so I invited Gary. I said, look, I mean you and I have completely but it would
seemed to be completely contradictory beliefs. I mean you believe in experts, I believe intuition. 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 whereas 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 of my life.
Beautiful. Well, can you remind me the title of the paper, because I really liked the title when I saw it.
Baber 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 fine. But a failure to disagree is certainly in the time.
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dot org. I look forward to welcoming you in December. You know you had written at one point you said, I had limited ambitions. I didn't aspire to great success. I was very hard working, but I didn't expect to be a famous psychologist. So it's not like you had these dreams when you're young, like I'm going to be a famous psychologist. You sort of, in a sense, you know, fell into these topics and then they captivated your interest you and you did great work with them, you know,
I mean, how would you describe the situation? How are you so great?
Uh? Well, you know, I at that actually feeling that my training had been inferior because I had, you know, I'd 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, saying, but first of all,
have to learn to be a short order cook. And so I started as really very limited and very precise experimental project and 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 met almost I mean I was starting me to become slightly more ambitious. But I certainly had no I had no expectations of any managor success. Now he was already a star.
Mm hmm.
So he was a star from graduate school and immediately recognize usself. I was good, but he was a star. And uh, and then together we were I think better than he was. I mean, we were far better than either of us. And so I was very lucky, so is he.
It sounds like just a special just a really special collaboration and once in a lifetime kind of collaboration that people be very lucky to find in their careers.
Oh.
Yes, I I have a few people like that in my life. I want to give a shout out to Colin to Young and David Aiden and James Kaufman and other researchers. 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 too. Could you explain to our listeners a little bit about, well, just how you would define the difference between the two before we really nerd out about this.
Well, there is a long history in psychology of the distinction between automatic processing and control processing. And it started out with the studies of search and how you start searching, say for a letter for a particular target letter in a set of letters, 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 learn to speak a foreign language 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 too were invented by one of these the Oki Spanovich was also interested in the field of judgment and decision making, so he was doing
research using problems that in Mostovskin I had developed. So I was familiar with his work, and 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, Good Gigorins were sort of intellectual adversary on this, and that's this phrase.
It's a title of benefice paper making cognitivelusions disappear. But you can make cognitivelusions disappear by providing cues that mobilize control thinking so that you're not blurting out your intuitions, but you act truly compute or your reason your way to announce, and then con 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
good gig Renzer and ourselves. And then there was a lot that you could do with that distinction, and eventually that became the core of their role. Ten 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. Because I was 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 the field of intelligence research had completely
ignored the distinction it had treated. It had never even like dawned on intelligence researchers in one hundred years to think that maybe we should call some of these system one processes intelligence.
You know.
So this was this was so I won't even know where I'm coming from. I was just totally scoonched in this work. And then started to do some research on 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 to get into 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 process under an overall umbrella. Right, you have within system one you can have things as varied from language learning to social Q learning to esthetic intuition in too, 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 too you have a whole pot prairie of different forms of rationality. You know Tkeith Stanovitch as he's gone through quite sensibly and all through different types of different ways that you know, we can use the rationality, use our system too thinking
to override O intelligence. Yes, so my question is you have you stayed up on these these really uh these really nerdy debates and where are you do you see merit? Kind of Yeah, I think.
It's a very important debate. Uh, And clearly, uh, there is a tradition in psychology that you're not supposed to invoke monculie a monculi being little people in the head whose behavior explains a person's behavior, and System one and System two are homuncula, So there's no question, you know, I vary 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 one and type two is the proper terminology because there are broad types of mental activities. But when you think of system one and system two, 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 one and type two they call for lists, and people are miserable the lists. But people are very good for very good apt is, finding routes, roots in space, you know, path to go from one place to the other. Were specialized for that, and we're specialized for thinking about agents. Lists are terrible, and so that's why I went to that language quite deliberately. So
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 the people who criticized 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 on and system two as if there were agents in the head. They were not thinking that this is an easy way of thinking about
type one and type which is what I intended. But you know, they were asking, what what do system one system to do in an inferant, 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 corrupting psychological thinking by bringing those a monculi the risk is real. The risk is real.
I agree. I agree with both the risk and the benefits. And but you know, you see people in the general public talking about this, and I noticed that some people start to try to just as a shorthand map it onto brain systems. Some people actually map it on to like left brain versus right brain thinking, And that makes
my brain want to explode when I see that. You know, no, it's not like you know that 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 very, very different process. Yeah, I think it's just important as you do. And I want to give you credit for mentioning this in your book. You know, to kind of to not to not try to essentialize
it and not view them as agents. But people will do it anyway in the general public who don't know all the nuanced, 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 too, you can translate into a more cumbersome but more accurate formulation Type one and Type two. It's just easier to think about.
Yeah, for sure. But just that you know, the general idea and the robots rebellion. Yeah, the work Keith Stanevich did 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 the system to have more free will than System one. You know, even just that question I wanted talked. I wanted people to talk to me about it, you know, like, and you know, 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, 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?
You have found I think the wrong person to talk with. Fair Enough, 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, brain is a physical object and with the rule of the throne, and there seems to be a tension between this feeling. But and altogether it's a mystery. You know, how does feeling work in a world of objects?
How does consciousness interact with objects? But obviously it's a puzzle. 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 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 more freedom of or more degrees of freedom be.
A 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 so system two operations are things you do, and system one operations happen to you. So you know that distinction, if you is, if you want to talk in terms of will of the will or control obviously System two is control and System one is not right.
As soon as you it's uncontroversial to use, whereas the control and freedom, as soon as you start saying free will, then the philosophers and the people who care about that get all mad because now you've you've entered their their realm of lingual sticks. You know that no we're calling free will is determined it, you know, for magical free will. So from going back to the big bang and it's like, okay, I'm sorry, yeah, so fair enough. Well, well here's a
topic I think does interest you. Because you reached out to me Abou's eight eight years ago or so, I was so deeply touched. I want you to know that I almost fell off my chair. Actually, I was sitting on my bed when I read your email, and I said at the end, I got to the bottoms of Dane o'connam and I almost fell off my bed. I can't believe I got an email out of the blue from.
Danna co but 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 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 not truly working on an individual difference with these.
Days amazing, let's talk about it.
Late in life. I've turned to that wonderful I belong with team that is trying to understand the famous cognitive reflection test. Then the bat and ball problem must be familiar to all your listeners and trying to understand the bat and ball problem. And Shane Frederick, who is the sort of the found of that whole line of research, he did that actually when he was a post stop 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 the system one and system two. And it's a key example the system one and system two because I say a bat and a ball together cost a dollar, then the bad cost a dollar more than the ball how much the ball costs, and you have an association and the association and expenses, and you solve that problem as if you were said a dollar ten is a dollar more then sense. That's that seems to happen. Now, it turns out they're very
interesting individual differences. And some people fail that problem because they fail problems. So 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 fifty percent of Harvard students say ten cents. Now, clearly if they bothered to check, they would know that they made a mistake. And almost all of them, they spent a minute or two would solve that problem. And
sow it's five sents. So what do we learn. We learn they don't check that as we learn that 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 bullshit 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 mind and the rational mind. I had the great pleasure of having Seemer Epstein on my podcast a couple of years ago, and he felt, quite frankly, he felt as though his dual process theory had not gotten as much attention as he
wished it could have. So, out of honor to him, who he's no longer with us, I wanted to bring this up because I think there was a lot of merit in his work linking the experiential mind to superstition and to conspiracy theories and all sorts of things. So, yeah, I want to hear some of your thoughts he had.
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 and I didn't think of including it. So he was absolutely right. 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 eighties and nineties. It had been there early, I think before the system one system two distinction was was forming through. And he had some brilliant examples of it. It's a beautiful example of that. That well, similar to the kind of thing that damas Uski and I had done that he attributed to the experiential the mode of thinking. So yes, that is a really great I have which is not not doing more with his work in my book, because.
That's really that's incredibly gracious of you to say that I formed like a friendship with him in the last couple of years of his life. And he actually asked me if i'd write the foreword to his to his book on the on the summarizing his life's work. So I hope that I honored it. He seemed to be happy with the with the foreword, so it just it made it made me happy to see him feel as though, you know, even.
I heard that he felt agreed. Uh and and and I'm sorry about my part.
Well, that's incredibly gracious view. It's it's obviously not just it's not you, it's it's a whole you know, system of assist like using the word system, but of there's so many profiation of different dual process theories. You know, someone wrote a review of like forty to fifty 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 to write a popular book, you know.
So yeah, yeah, so I just adopted that tominology. In fact, I described my interpretation with 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 than I didn't.
Beautiful. I'm touched by even your response to that. So yeah, it's just like the individual differences aspects. So there is this is the insight I had, and I want you to tell me what you think of this. In my dissertation, there just was so much of a focus on individual differences and system two. I mean, Keith Danovich it's all the individual system too. And he and Keith Stanach had a line in one of his papers where he said individual difference 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 my dissertation I feel like this area of individual differences in system one has really been long neglected in the field of cognitive science.
You know.
I found that that they're in pus A learning. For instance, your ability to probabilistically we're in the rule structure of the very complex rule structure of the world was correlated almost zero with IQ. So you have people who 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, you know, with their ability to unconsciously detect complex patterns. I thought that was interesting.
What do you think, well, I think it is very interesting. The question that I was impressed by. I was thinking system mons slightly differently than you did in my concern with individual differences when I approached you. And this, for me, system one is where we have representations of the world, so that our model of the world is in associative memory, and that for me is in 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 poorer, 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 what will happen, to generate explanations of what could happen. There must be individual differences in that, and I didn't find any adequate treatment of that aspect,
of the richness aspect. You're absolutely right. The 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 individual differences in the experiential mind being linked to artistic and esthetics and so and it did so when I found these individual differences, I found there were linked to opens to experience, the personality trait, which then opened up the whole world of creativity and the arts and all these things that like you know that I feel
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 you're absolutely right. It's it's very largely neglected. And yeah, and that whole tradition of work on thinking and reasoning and judgment and decision making. Uh, it's really although it doesn't believe in logic as an explanation of psychology, but it's infused with it's a reaction to logic. It's always logic is always there, and the kind of thing that you're talking about, logic isn't even there.
And that's okay, And that's okay, it's almost there was such a bye. I felt that there was this meta bias in the bias literature towards like emotions are always that's well, that's bad. We've got to count all the emotions. Yeah, I think you're absolutely But 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. So let's move into hedonism or hedonic psychology. Let's move into
herdonic psychology. So that is the work you started doing in the nineties when you're kind of moving from judgment decision making too to this Why how did you move into that area? Was it was it did Ed Diner influence you at all?
No? No, okay, I moved into that area because of the puzzle. The puzzle uh that that came up when Emerson and I were working on the decision making prospect, the publisher prospect theory, which deals with the curvature of utility functions or value functions, that we don't respond linearly
to amounts of money, but that the response changes. That is, a difference of one hundred dollars makes a very big difference if you have one hundred dollars in terms of two hundred, But if you have ten thousands 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 you are supposed to get injections, painful injections in the buck one a day, 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 twelve to two and from twenty to ten? 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 twelve to two than from twenty to ten, 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 ten days of pain exactly the same. So that turns out. It turns out that the logic of think when you think about experiences doesn't fit the logic when you think about making decisions and about numbers. So that was the puzzle that
led me into studying experience. So, and that's another way of looking at the basic concept of utility in economics and in sort of decision theory. Utility is infilled from choices, from preferences. But thinking of utility at the utility as an experience that was non existence in the field. I mean, Bentham had those ideas centuries ago, but in the field of decision making, that idea was absent and absolute in economics. So that's that's how I got to.
Well, that is really cool and uh and and it just it's just fixed the whole like there were a whole bunch of influence of things of that was like in the air because a Diner started soon after started studying life satisfaction as even before or even before it wasn't okay.
You know, Dina had been in the field of well being a long time, the eighties, his entire career. He's the younger than I am, but not by whom. But yeah, in the early eighties he had a classic review, so maybe.
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 that I well, it was an important bridge and it was an important distinction that it's what allowed us to see this core distinction between the experiential self and the remembered self. You know, ed Diner's work seems to be the remember itself. You're taking a self report questionnaire 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 Mehi chick sent me high approach, you know, like you developed another one. He did experience sampling, but I believe you developed another technique that was really cool.
By the way, had that distinction. 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 six and behind had done experienced sampling, so he had studied that, but it was not perceived as a measure of well being. It was not an And 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 nineteen ninety eight he starts this field positive psychology. So do you you've had some criticisms of the field of positive psychology. I'd love to hear what some of your current thinking is, because I because I do think the field has evolved.
I think the field did start out mostly focused on happiness and and and subjective well being, but has now expanded. Do you have researcher studying meaning the science of meaning connections? You know, 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 field.
So I was interested in the fact that there are those two definitions of happiness. I mean, one of them is life this action, and the other is the average level of affect in your experience. And actually you can measure them independency 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 social context and on love and on how much time you spend
with people you love. And that's those other things that determine emotional happiness. Life satisfaction is determined much more conventionally by a success by how much you achieve relative to and that's income and education and prestige, and they contribute and sort of living a conventionally successful life. That is, to be married, to have children, not to be divorced, 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 never did much with the meaning of life in a way it's related to the issue of consciousness that we were talking about speak to me. But the main 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, including Paul Dolan in the UK, who was my post doctor, have tried with some success, I think limited success, to say that people have experience of meaning in real time, and that's an interesting issue. My focus on this and well, 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 epi 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 might have of the whole wellbeing movement that it's really diametrically opposed in some sense to Selligment's points. I think there isn't enough for some misery, that is all. And I think that as a social objective for society, the maximization of well being is secondary, but minimizing suffering is an objective that we get all agree on, and
as an objective for policy. Instead of setting happiness as a measure of policy, setting the reduction of misery as an 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 response to the currents.
Will be so first of all, how do you define suffering? Let me just ask you that question, like, what do you even how do you even operationalize such a thing?
Well, that there are various ways. So the obvious way is experienced samply, where you periodically, you know, you bring people 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 develop the 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'd say of people that they suffer when they're in a state that they would want to escape. So that is operational much easier to define than happiness means 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 a few sample in the United States,
so we did the same thing in France. When you look at a lot of people and take the average over time. You know, ten fifteen percent of the overall time of the population is spent in a negative emotional state, and that is very unevenly distributed in the population. A minority of people do most of the suffering and the illnesses 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. We vary in how happy we are, and you know, but that's that's genetically determined optimism. But there it's easy to measure suffering.
Yeah, I appreciate that clarification. I I I have made the point to Marty as as people in his orbit call Martin Seligam, and we call Marty because I worked with him closely for for five 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. But anyway, 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 definitely agree.
Yeah, yeah, I mean that's been a very significant predicesm I think of positive psychology, which is that, in a deep sense, it's a very conservative approach. That is, you want to train the way that people feel about their lives, but that means you're not trying to train their lives. And that's the point that you were making right now, I think that you want to change people's lives and not 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 to the field of positive psychology. That couldn't one make the case that that that those who getting them above the zero line
is that that will rise the tide for humanity. You know, in a way, analogous argument and debate is happening in the gifted education field and education, so you could, I think, perhaps extrapolate your argument to the to that field and say, well, we really should focus all of our resources on remediation, on helping the students who are most poor poor, uh
and and those who lack educational opportunities. But couldn't one argue that 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 to supply, and the question is who are we supplying it too? Now, happiness is not a results that we supply. I mean, it's not a society distributing happiness. So people are living their lives 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 suftwering. Now, it's not that I'm against you. Some of my best friends are positive psychologists, so I'm not I'm not against positive psychology. One of my heroes is Richard Laird in the UK.
Oh wow, that would make him feel You're really good to know. I'm going to tell him that you just called him one of your heroes.
I mean, he knows that we're I introduced, actually I am. 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 too. He actually came to instant to think about being with me and we stay friends.
Both are both legends. You're what's within say that.
Again, we were born within ten days.
I did not know that.
So yeah, and I know that you're not against the field of posit psychology. There's also you know, there's just a lot of nuances here that my brain's just going off in lots of different directions. So there's also 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.
And it is possible, And I think this is what Richard Laird is doing specifically in the UK. He has he has interventions to improve happiness. But but I think measurement is in the background. It's going to be evidence face and his major contribution to well being has been a massive effort to provide cognitive behavioral therapy is 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 labor and conservatives and increase together with Professor Clark from Oxford, the clinical psychologists, they have really trained the face of comnitive behavior therapy and greatly improved it. And all of that is very strictly evidence based, and so you can do rigorous applied psychology of.
I actually want to tell you about a paper that I wrote with my colleagues Allan Goodman, actually she was the lead author, found Goodman, David Disbato, and Todd Kashton.
What we wanted to do is we wanted to.
Look because I think a lot of this is a measurement issue with solve a problem with self report within the field. We wanted to see what is the lead and what was the correlation between subjective well being measure you know, just simply how satisfy fight with your life and the latent factor of all these other kinds of tests of uh facets of well being that have been developed like meaning and positive relationships and all this. We
found a point nine nine to eight correlation. But to I'll send you the paper, a point nine to eight correlation between you know, the standard subjective well being measure, a couple of items, and a very very COMPREHENDI the latent factor of a very comprehensive battery, a multi dimensional of well being. I think it's very very hard in this field to rely on self report and and because of a lot of issues you've pointed out in your
own career of retrospective thinking. What you do when you take one of these questionnaires is you tend to think, 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 got meaning too, Oh yeah, I got you know. And 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 anyway, we just we think there's some real methodological issues here.
I mean, you know 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 less satisfaction. But it's the same as an intelligence. You have many tests, you can extract a single factor, and there are still varieties of intelligence, miracles,
spatial vocabulary. So the fact that you can extract a single dominant actor and find a good measure for it really does not exclude the possibility I think, uh, that that you could also find discriminations.
Well, I think, yeah, just data a little further nuanced to what we found.
I mean with with the wait.
With structural modelings, you know, you can do look at different models, and what I think is interesting is that like the one factor model of of all these disparate things was a better fit than some than than parsing them out, you know, in other various ways.
I haven't seen your paper. I would just say that there is a fair amount of research I think that indicates that h different circumstances and different personality types are associated with different emotions, and so some people are angry and other people are depressed, and that both negative states.
But uh, 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, but but they are multi dimensional.
So sure, for sure, I I don't want to argue they're not multidimensional, but I think it's harder to get at it with the self report questionnaires. I guess it is the point. I mean, you're doing a retrospective evaluation. Well, we need 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 oh, the Stone of the USC who might collaborated twenty years ago in the study of well being. He is a master in the study of experience sampling, and he was one of those who developed the day reconstruction method, which is retrospected, and he had good results indicating that actually you capture experience quite well if by retrospective judgments of
experience at the end of the day. Yeah, there's a lot of evidence for that, so that if you focus people on their emotional experience, so they remember them, I mean not perfectly, 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 compare it to other people's life. You're not going 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 now it's really super interesting. The wealth and happiness link is another very very interesting one, and you had published research showing that above about seventy five one thousand per
year income, it splits off. So you don't see much more return on your investment in terms of the experience, but you do see still see increase in life satisfaction. Is that the basic finding?
Yeah, I mean that's a gallop has been studying well being since the early two thousand. I was a consultant with them, and I was actually instrumental in their adding questions about ethic and about emotion to their questionnaires, so that they have a measure that allows you that they also have a general measure of life satisfaction, the ladder of life so called, which is essentially life satisfaction. So they have both, and we studied and they have both.
And I'm Dino was a consultant with them. I was a consultant with them. That's that's how it began. And in the Gallop data, it's absolutely clear that when you look at experience then in the United States, about about seventy five thousand dollars, it really flattens. I mean, we Angus Deaton, the economists, famous economists, Angus Deaton and I did that study where we found absolutely no increase in
emotional satisfaction beyond seventy five thousand dollars. I think there have been data don't find a slight increase, but it's clear that there is some inflection and that the curve for life satisfaction is different and steeper, and that life satisfaction continues increasing beyond that. Now, there has been a study recently by killings Worth which shows using different techniques and so on, which seems to show of shows that
emotions keep improving with income. So we have two discrepanty results. There is no question that our result is solid and replicable, and there is no real explanation so far at the discrepancy that is. What happened is that Killing's Worth is more recent. I mean, this is something that happens all
the time in psychology and social sciences. The more recent paper is assumed to do justice to everything that happened before it, and Killing's Worth interpretation of why his results are different from ours is, of course it blains our research and that our researchers that. But in fact it's perfectly clear that I think he has explanation of the discrepancy doesn't hold water. And I have no idea what the explament, 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 right, 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. Yeah.
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 is a direct implication of thinking about emotion, is that whether you spend your time commuting or with your children makes a big difference your emotional happiness over a day. I mean, you know two days that you could two hours each day that you could spend this way or that way makes a big difference. So that's doubt would be the case.
Yeah, I would love to talk about your new book Noise. Okay, 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 they and the variability is noise. And so there are clearly that both sources of inaccuracy because if bias is zero, but measurements are all over the place, they're just on average, they are correct, they're
still not accurate. Now, there is a way of measuring error, of measuring accuracy, which is accepted in all the sciences. It's been around for since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It's associated 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 error. 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 more harder to represent and much harder to think about, and much harder to realize the role
of variability in inaccuracy in error. So that's bias and noise. Now where do you find noise, Because it's a very abstract thing. If you look 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 with seven years, the standard deviation with three point eight. That means that a defendant faces a lottery depending on which judge will be assigned her. That is unacceptable.
There is noise in medicine. There is noise in the evaluation of assets. There is noise in the assignment of children to foster care. There is noise in patents. 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 the football team losers. So that's that's noise within a judge. Anyway, that's noise, and that's what all else. Maybe some book is about written with two collaboratives.
It's it's fascinating and I'm trying to wrap my head around this. With like i Q 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 you have a range of in your how how uh you know you have confidence intervals? You know, how can you? 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 well
in for college selection. Do you do you see a lot of noise in college admissions or.
There's a lot of noise in college admissions. Yeah, there's a lot of noise in hiring. I mean that's well known. There's a lot of noise in personal evaluation. I mean the conclusion in studies of the evaluations that employees get that the ratings that get the ratings are more predictable. You can predict ratings better if you know who did the rating, then if you know who the at is.
So that's problematic.
Noise is generally problematic and frequently completely ignored. It's assumed a way. You're right.
So not that you need me to say you're right, but you're right, you're right.
Well, yeah, this is important. This is important.
I need people to say I'm right on this one.
No, it's so important.
We're let's talk about how this relates to the proliferation of diversity and inclusion initiatives in hiring practices because they're focused on reducing bias, right, But how could they benefit perhaps from also considering noise? I thought, I 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. But it turns out when you look at it carefully, there are huge differences between judges and
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. I 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 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. Notice, I see, and there is a lot of that.
Yeah, so a different way of framing it.
I really like this.
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 and as as a problem, then.
Noise can be easy. Yeah.
Yeah, I think that's what we're saying, and that's the point about Yeah, I get it, I get it. I love it. I'm so glad that you that you you put pointed a finger at it. So you talk about ways of trying to make this reduce ways of reducing noise. You talk about decision hygiene. 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 hygiene from medication of 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 it germs, you're protecting yourself. 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. And an example of hygiene is that when 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 intwo segments, evaluating each segment in a fact based way, and then having a global evaluation which can be intuited. That is hygiene. That's an improvement
that will reduce noise, reduce bias, and improve decisions. And there are other steps that belong to decision hygiene, like making judgment comparative. So people are we are not very good at making absolute judgments how 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 more accuracy in relative judgments absolute, So trying to switch people to make comparative judgements and providing them with comparative scale that are easy to use. That's decision that's a stick in decision hype. And we have a few more.
And all this falls in the brail of you know, a noise audit. That's I like this idea of a noise audit that you go to a workplace and maybe they will have noise audit consultants or something someday. You know that that could be a new field where you go in and armed all it. Oh yeah, all these principles. I found the quote that I really liked to illustrate the point where we're 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 rue, and the omission is so obvious that we wanted to do something about it. That's when the book wonderful.
You know, how have you just a general couple of general questions about your life? You know, how do you think you've grown over the course of your life? You know, I saw an interview did with Sam HARRISY asked you if studying biases your whole life has made you less biased, and you said no, not really.
You said, not really, but 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, I mean you change, you developed some wisdom, and the wisdom is that the number of things that you get very excited about diminishes, and 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 just if you live long enough and you don't lose
your marbles completely, this will happen to you. Ah, this is you know, it's growth in a certain sense, but it also it's because when you grow old, you also become detached and you are less part of the action, and you're less involved and you're less relevant, and all that enables you too 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.
M And with the cognitive biases in particular, you know, are there any Are there any that you feel like you've really you've really moved and moved the dialon throughout the course of your career.
Of those Yeah, I mean there are a few cognic biases that, uh, you can sometimes be aware of that, Oh 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 to your humility 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, inspires me in a way, and it also makes me feel hopeless as well.
I think the latter is appropriate.
I mean, I've question just about winning the Nobel Prize. In what way did winning the Nobel Prize increase your happiness in life?
Oh? You know, in multiple ways. I mean, but I'm going to tell you something that people don't realize. I mean, the experience of winning that prize. I mean, the thing that's most really about that experience is how much pleasure it gives to other people. So anybody who will likes you, they don't have to like you. Anybody who is connected to you feel some pleasure. And you know, this is totally unjustified. I mean, there is no logic behind it
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 be grudge 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 So that was the major thing during the first year, when I was really conscious of it, with so much pleasure.
This was giving to everybody around me. That that in itself is sort of great happiness, is that you feel your sort of people happy. You're making people happy by something that is happening to you.
That was your mother.
Your mother will tell everyone about it.
Yeah, but Danny, my son, Danny got the Nobel Prize.
You weren't around and but but you know, neighbors would say, I mean, and so that's part of it. It's really quick. I hadn't anticipated this, but I'm long traded. But the initial experience that was very saying. And in general it certainly improves life. Fine, I recommend it to everybody. Uh
it's not uh uh. You know, your credibility increases people people, and you get more access to resources, but you mainly and you're taken 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're lively dominate your life, it's not good.
But you know, well, not only dominate your life. I mean, to what extent overconfidence could also be a problem. To what extent did it? Did it increase your confidence? Were you ever insecure before winning the Nobel Prize? Did it make you feel more confident?
Oh? Yeah, I mean I think. Uh, I once heard somebody described the experience of being knighted and uh, and you had the phrase that really impressed me. He said, you don't sweat the small stuff. Uh, that's 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. M hmm. It feels quite unfair.
I feel like everyone should be able to win the Nobel Prize at some point in their life to to increase their their well being. And yeah, so you know.
What advice?
Okay, Well, this is the question 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 spend your career studying.
Oh? I think today I would go either in brain science, into brain science or into artificial intelligiums. Hmm. 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 there's a whole fascinating literature on bias in algorithms, and that's a whole other topic. But you know what I mean, that's if you could apply your work to that area. What do you see as the next era of behavioral economics and behavioral science?
I have a rule against foecasting. I just don't believe people can do it. And you know, I can say trivial things about what is happening now and which is likely to remain so over the next four or five years, but I nobody can predict what happened. And those who tell you they can of just eluding themselves.
Hey, that's an answer in itself. So fair enough, Yeah, fair enough. 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 grass legacy to be?
I I think I don't. Uh, you know, I don't spend much time thinking about it. Uh. I'm pleased right now that I think you know, right, now, I think that I would like the idea of noise to capture on I would have liked adversarial collaboration to catch I think that the way that we can do 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 is getting different results.
This is really not a way to conduct science. I mean to have somebody in and then no contact. Yeah, 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. But you get it's very adversarial 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 love that.
I wish I saw that more in Congress for instance. You know that's a different story, I know, but but I wish we just saw that in various different aspects of my 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 in next hundred years, do you have like any general sort of wisdom?
No, of course not. I mean you know I wouldn't. I wouldn't there give advice to my grandchildren. I mean, all right, you know I can give them advice about how to navigate. Well, that's too at school.
But 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 too? Young psychologists are 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 from mediocre ideas instead of looking for better ones. Uh, that's that I think, HM. And being willing to move if things don't work, and not getting stuck.
That would be my advice. But also consider whether this is the life for you, that is academic life has you know, because it's it's a better is 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 think I wrote that in Thinking Fast
and Slow. But it's that in order to be a scientist successful scientist, you have to be a to exaggerate the importance of what you're doing. If you cannot exaggerate the importance of what you're involved in, you will feel futile. And you can see that in order to be passionate about what you're doing, you have to think that this is the most interesting thing in the whole universe. So at least, I mean, I'm exaggerating now, but you have
to view it as bigger than it really is. And not everybody has that characteristic, and some people have it too much, you know.
That's a different story.
Is there a study that you.
Wish you had done and didn't you They're like, wow, I wish I did this study.
Well, I mean, you know constantly you have that when I read experiments by other people, you know, when I'm very impressed.
You know, I wish, but I guess I'm more a study that hasn't been done yet. But you're like, ohhh, you know, if I had the resources, if I had.
Oh you know, there must have been I don't remember that. It's not something that I have stought that I had that regret about the study I should have done.
And no, So this is my last question, 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 reflection on overall? Have you been happy, satisfied, content, et cetera.
Well, men, you know, I view myself as being extraordinarily lucky. So I was, you know, I was lucky. I didn't you know, we spoke about the war that I had in Europe and so on, but I was lucky. I survived and I didn't really suffer hunger, 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. All my work has been social, and I've enjoyed every part
of it. So it's yeah, that's my main evaluation. I've been very fooled.
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, your intellect, 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 don't stop there? Where did I embarres you? At what point?
Oh?
Gotcha? Gotcha?
Well, I I hear you. I really do mean it from the bottom of my heart. So thanks again, Thank you. 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 the discussion at thus Psychology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube page the Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so
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