Speaker 1: Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is
Speaker 1: part of the best of series, where we highlight some
Speaker 1: of the most exciting and enthralling and enlightening episodes from
Speaker 1: the archives of the Psychology Podcast. Enjoy today. It's great
Speaker 1: to chat with Daniel Kahneman. One of the most influential
Speaker 1: psychologists of all time. Cooman is known for his work
Speaker 1: on the psychology of judgment and decision making, as well
Speaker 1: as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the two
Speaker 1: thousand and two Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He's
Speaker 1: author of the best selling book Thinking Fast and Slow
Speaker 1: and co author of the recent book Noise Off, Wall
Speaker 1: and Judgment. In twenty thirteen, Codoman received the Presidential Medal
Speaker 1: Freedom from Barack Obama. Daniel is so great to chat
Speaker 1: with you today.
Speaker 2: It's a pleasure to be here.
Speaker 1: I'm so excited to chat with you. You are such
Speaker 1: a legend in the field, as you know, and there's
Speaker 1: so much we could talk about, and I know we're
Speaker 1: going to get into all the nerdy stuff, but I
Speaker 1: actually want to start with more of the humanity of you,
Speaker 1: because I think your personal story and sort of where
Speaker 1: you're born and what you live through is utterly fascinating
Speaker 1: and and just like a one of a kind kind
Speaker 1: of experience. So you were born in Tel Aviv, but
Speaker 1: you spend most of your childhood in Paris when it
Speaker 1: was occupied by Nazi Germany in nineteen forty that's is
Speaker 1: that right?
Speaker 2: That's correct.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so you.
Speaker 1: Went for this time where you know, even your father
Speaker 1: was picked up in the first major round of French Jews,
Speaker 1: but he was released six weeks later due to the
Speaker 1: intervention of his employer. Do you recall could you do
Speaker 1: have that memory in your head of like visiting that
Speaker 1: that concentration camp or visiting where he was imprisoned.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I have a very vivid memory, so you know
Speaker 2: it it was like a fortress, and of course we
Speaker 2: couldn't come close to it. There was there was a wall,
Speaker 2: and there were policemen, and there were lots of people
Speaker 2: hanging on you know, all the windows, and lots of
Speaker 2: women and children. It was still you know, the extermination
Speaker 2: hadn't started yet, so we were still there. And one
Speaker 2: thing I do remember is a policeman telling us they're
Speaker 2: hungry in there, they're eating peels, and that that is
Speaker 2: an image I've kept. I've also kept the image of
Speaker 2: my father when he was released. By the way, the
Speaker 2: story of his release is an interesting one because his
Speaker 2: employer was a fascist. In fact, he was one of
Speaker 2: the most important collaborators with the Nazis in France. But
Speaker 2: he really loved my father and he had enough cloud
Speaker 2: with the Germans to get my father released, as it were,
Speaker 2: as if he were essential to the to the war efforts.
Speaker 2: To the German war effort because my father was a
Speaker 2: specialist in paint was amazing.
Speaker 1: And when he came back, he was skinned, you know,
Speaker 1: basically skin and bones, but he came back in a suit.
Speaker 1: Is that right?
Speaker 3: With dignity?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's that is another image that I have.
Speaker 2: He weighed, I mean he was a short man. He
Speaker 2: had a childhood disease, so he was less than five
Speaker 2: foot six, I think five foot five, and but he
Speaker 2: weighed forty five kilo, which forty five kilos would be
Speaker 2: about one hundred pounds actually exactly one hundred pounds, and
Speaker 2: there was very little of him. But my mother and
Speaker 2: I had gone out to be and we planned to
Speaker 2: be there to greet him, but he had come before
Speaker 2: us and had taken a bath and had put on
Speaker 2: a suit and was waiting for us before eating, although
Speaker 2: he must have been very, very hungry. And that image
Speaker 2: he is the one who opened the door. That's an
Speaker 2: image of him that have kept. Yes.
Speaker 1: And there's another story that I heard that just touched
Speaker 1: me so much where you know, there was this curfew
Speaker 1: I guess after six pm, Jews couldn't leave the house.
Speaker 1: And you were staying late at a friend's house and
Speaker 1: you were coming home after then you turned your shirt
Speaker 1: inside out so that the Jewish star wouldn't be visible
Speaker 1: so you wouldn't get in trouble, and a guard saw you.
Speaker 1: And what happened next.
Speaker 2: Well, he was ans soldier. He was wearing a black uniform.
Speaker 2: And I was seven at the time, but I knew
Speaker 2: that they were the worst of the worst. And we
Speaker 2: were walking about to meet I actually went a few
Speaker 2: years back. I went, and I checked my memory of
Speaker 2: what the street looked like, and I found the exact
Speaker 2: spot where where this had happened. But and you know,
Speaker 2: we walked forward each other and he beckoned me and
Speaker 2: and he picked me up and he hugged me, and
Speaker 2: I was really frightened that he would see into my
Speaker 2: sweater and see that I was wearing a star of
Speaker 2: David then, but he didn't he put me down. He
Speaker 2: opened his wallet. He showed me a picture of a
Speaker 2: little boy, and he gave me some money, and then
Speaker 2: he went his way. I went mine, and and yeah,
Speaker 2: that's uh, that's a story, I remember quick, vividly.
Speaker 1: And your mom had told you that that humans are
Speaker 1: endlessly complicated and fascinating, and that certainly dovetails with your
Speaker 1: mom's wisdom there.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that that I really remember, because it
Speaker 2: is true that my mom was a gossip, but she
Speaker 2: was an interesting gossip and and nothing was black and white,
Speaker 2: and gossip wasn't about stories, it was about his character,
Speaker 2: and it was always complicated. And I remember thinking that
Speaker 2: this is really complicated in hearing this many which just
Speaker 2: soon killed me. But he has a little boy just
Speaker 2: like me, and he has emotions just like my father, and.
Speaker 1: So yeah, this is the you know, the start of
Speaker 1: seeing the complexity of human psychology there in such a
Speaker 1: remarkable way. So when France was liberated, so he moved around,
Speaker 1: you know, when your father came back kind of kind
Speaker 1: of on the.
Speaker 2: Round to escape, so we escaped. You know that France
Speaker 2: was divided at the time between occupied France, which was
Speaker 2: literally occupied by the Germans, and sort of the the
Speaker 2: other part of France, which was sort of governed by
Speaker 2: French fascists who collaborated with the Germans, but they were
Speaker 2: less bad to the Jews, of course, and so we
Speaker 2: escaped there in nineteen forty two when I was eight,
Speaker 2: and that's where we spent the rest of them and
Speaker 2: then the Germans walled into that area when the Allies
Speaker 2: were threatening invasion, and then the situation became very very
Speaker 2: well impossible for the Jews, and so we moved, we
Speaker 2: moved around. We ended the war in a chicken group
Speaker 2: for me, a converted chicken next to a cafe in
Speaker 2: a small village in the well of France and nearly Moorish.
Speaker 2: And that's where my father died, and that's where we were.
Speaker 2: He died six weeks before full d Day, before the
Speaker 2: Allies Invada Europe, and and that's where we were when
Speaker 2: the war ended.
Speaker 1: Amazing, you know, it's just amazing. It's what is amazing
Speaker 1: as well, is that that young children go through these
Speaker 1: things and without just thinking it's not I mean, you
Speaker 1: know it at some level, it's not normal. But it
Speaker 1: can kind of you know, you don't know any other
Speaker 1: kind of life, right, you know. I remember my grandma
Speaker 1: telling me because she escaped the Pagrams in Russia, and
Speaker 1: I remember her telling me how she hid in a
Speaker 1: wagon and went from and it was just like, oh,
Speaker 1: this is what normal children do. They escape, They escape
Speaker 1: guards in a wagon. You know, what was it? You know,
Speaker 1: just thinking back your memory of of what you were
Speaker 1: thinking during that time, do you remember thinking yourself, you know,
Speaker 1: like like this this is wrong, like or did you
Speaker 1: think yourself, Oh, this is just normal.
Speaker 2: No, I mean I knew it wasn't. Yeah, I mean
Speaker 2: when one of the thoughts that I remember having, it
Speaker 2: was and the sister was nine years older than I was,
Speaker 2: so I was nine, she was eighteen, and she could
Speaker 2: have joined the resistance, the French resistance. But it turned
Speaker 2: out later that I was the only member of the
Speaker 2: family to whom this thought occurred, because our mentality were
Speaker 2: the mentality of hunted rabbits, and hunted rabbits just don't
Speaker 2: fight back, I mean, they just try to survive another day.
Speaker 2: And that was very an important part actually of my identity,
Speaker 2: and that made living in Israel, moving to Israel very
Speaker 2: a major experience in my life because Israel was a
Speaker 2: symbol of not being Rabbits anymore. I mean, this is
Speaker 2: a place where you can defend yourself, it can be strong.
Speaker 2: And during the war, the main thing that you know,
Speaker 2: I was it was weakness and strength and the idea
Speaker 2: that you know, Rabbits are weak. And I even thought
Speaker 2: that my father was weak, was weak for dying when
Speaker 2: we needed him. And uh so, yeah, that was I
Speaker 2: lived through that. But I should add I don't think
Speaker 2: that this shaped me in any profound way. I don't,
Speaker 2: you know, I don't know what I would have been
Speaker 2: with different experiences, But I really do not race anything
Speaker 2: that happened to me to those years.
Speaker 1: Mhm. Fascinating. I guess we don't. We won't. We can't
Speaker 1: do the experiment. But it must have. Yeah, it very
Speaker 1: lea shaped your interest in human psychology.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it probably did. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Francis liberated and in nineteen forty six the family
Speaker 1: moved to Palestine. This this is this is pre Israel.
Speaker 1: This is this is this is at the birth. We're
Speaker 1: literally at the birth of a nation. Right, you know
Speaker 1: what was it? It wasn't called Palestine. It was called
Speaker 1: the British Mandatory Palestine, right or something like that. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: what my own question there is what was that like?
Speaker 1: I mean, there's not many people I can ask what
Speaker 1: was it like to live at the birth of Israel?
Speaker 2: That's right, not all that many. Well, I remember we
Speaker 2: moved there in nineteen forty six, and in nineteen forty
Speaker 2: seven there was a UN declaration that allowed the state,
Speaker 2: Jurish state to exist, and I remember dancing in the streets.
Speaker 2: I was thirteen then, and and the war began. As
Speaker 2: soon as the British retreated, the Israel was attacked by
Speaker 2: the Arab countries around it, and and yeah, there was
Speaker 2: a war and it lasted off and on for more
Speaker 2: than a year. The casualty level was huge, by you know,
Speaker 2: the standards of today. There were one percent of the
Speaker 2: population of the population at the beginning died in the war.
Speaker 2: But by the end of the war in nineteen forty nine,
Speaker 2: it was you know, it was a new country and
Speaker 2: it was still very new when I went into the
Speaker 2: Armia where well, I don't know, if you want anything,
Speaker 2: to go.
Speaker 3: Into battle, yeah, going to it, going to it.
Speaker 2: Well, so everything was really new, and you know, everything
Speaker 2: had to be improvised, from uniforms to to rule regulations,
Speaker 2: what have you. I went I was seventeen when I
Speaker 2: graduated from high school, and there was a special unit
Speaker 2: of the Israeli Army that was called the Academic Reserve,
Speaker 2: where it was the equivalent of our OTC, but where
Speaker 2: you well, went through officer training during the summers, but
Speaker 2: went to university and I studied psychology and mathematics, and
Speaker 2: in nineteen fifty four I went into the army. So
Speaker 2: that's a very long time ago. And I was a
Speaker 2: platoon commander for a year, and then I became a
Speaker 2: psychologist because you know, I had a BA in psychologist,
Speaker 2: and as with a BA in psychology, I were the
Speaker 2: best trained psychologists in the Israeli Army. I mean, there
Speaker 2: was my direct commander. I was in a research unit
Speaker 2: and my direct commander with a chemist. His train had
Speaker 2: been in chemistry, absolutely a brilliant man, and we were
Speaker 2: doing things that well, you know, I was assigned to
Speaker 2: do things that I had no business doing, like setting
Speaker 2: up an interviewing system for the Israeli Army, which I did,
Speaker 2: and only recently I got a copy of the report
Speaker 2: that I wrote in nineteen fifty six. It's fined by
Speaker 2: Lieutenant Khanama with my number, very short number, because this
Speaker 2: was really the beginning. I mean, the numbers now, the
Speaker 2: soldiers numbers are much much longer. But and I described,
Speaker 2: you know, how I had set up the interview, and
Speaker 2: it turned out that that interview and everything around it
Speaker 2: had a profound influence on my career and on my thinking.
Speaker 2: And it's actually I'm really ending my career by repeating
Speaker 2: the main principles that guided me when I did when
Speaker 2: I created that interview in nineteen fifty six. So that's
Speaker 2: this is surely an unusual and very fortunate experience because
Speaker 2: the idea of the interview I had read a book
Speaker 2: by Paul me I mean, my boss, the chemist, had
Speaker 2: given me that book to read. It had just come out,
Speaker 2: and I was very influenced by it and by the
Speaker 2: idea that you really couldn't trust people's judgments and that
Speaker 2: you wanted things to be as objective as possible. And
Speaker 2: so I constructed instead of the clinical interview, where your
Speaker 2: objective is before a mental image of your patient, of
Speaker 2: your patient or the recruit, whoever. It is the system
Speaker 2: that existed in Israeli only when it was a clinical
Speaker 2: interview where people had to interview recruits and decided how
Speaker 2: fit they were for combat. And there was enough information
Speaker 2: to know that that interview was had no validity or whatsoever,
Speaker 2: or almost none, and so I was assigned to improve
Speaker 2: on it. And from Meil I learned that reliability is essential,
Speaker 2: and so instead of having people form an intuitive opinion,
Speaker 2: I had them rate six traits. That is, the interview
Speaker 2: was divided into six parts, each associated with a particular
Speaker 2: trait that they had to rate on a scale from
Speaker 2: one to five at the end of each part of
Speaker 2: the interview. And they were strongly discouraged from trying to
Speaker 2: form a general image until all the information was in
Speaker 2: And so that was that was the interview. And there
Speaker 2: were interviews. I was like twenty two at the time
Speaker 2: and they were twenty, but you know I was. I
Speaker 2: was in charge, and they were furious with me, and
Speaker 2: they were furious with me because they had been doing
Speaker 2: those clinical interviews and they had been using their intuitions,
Speaker 2: and they had been feeling very good about their intuitions.
Speaker 2: And I remember one of them saying, you're turning us
Speaker 2: into robots. That is because I you know, there were questions.
Speaker 2: It was a semi structured interview. There was a list
Speaker 2: of questions about each of several traits, like how punctual
Speaker 2: you were, sociable you were. I had one that was
Speaker 2: called masculine pride, which today you wouldn't want to use
Speaker 2: that term, but at the time it seemed very fitting.
Speaker 2: And so I told them, uh, you know, I realized
Speaker 2: that the morale was at state that it was really
Speaker 2: unacceptable to them not to have an outlet for their intuition.
Speaker 2: And so I told them, you do the interview my way,
Speaker 2: and don't worry about validity. You worry about reliability. I mean,
Speaker 2: in my arrogance, I said, I will worry about the validity,
Speaker 2: you worry about being reliable. But when you're done, close
Speaker 2: your eyes and make a judgment of how good is
Speaker 2: sober will that soldier be? And there are two stories
Speaker 2: associated with that. The first one is that a few
Speaker 2: months later we got data on the validity of the
Speaker 2: interview for various criteria like being sent to of his
Speaker 2: training or going to drail or different things that could
Speaker 2: happen to a soldier, and that the interview was had
Speaker 2: really significant polility. I mean, it was a big improvement
Speaker 2: what had happened before. But what was quite remarkable in
Speaker 2: the results with that intuitive judgment at the very end
Speaker 2: was very good. In fact, it was just as good
Speaker 2: as the average of the six ratings, which I thought
Speaker 2: we would use, and it added information. So the final
Speaker 2: score with the average of the average of the six
Speaker 2: ratings and the final rating. Because that's what came out
Speaker 2: that it was independently valid, and that stayed with me
Speaker 2: all my life. That is that you should watch it.
Speaker 2: You shouldn't trust intuition, but ultimately you have to have it,
Speaker 2: and ultimately it's a wonderful thing, but you have to
Speaker 2: delay it. And it turns out that in the book
Speaker 2: that I'm writing and working on I was working on
Speaker 2: until a couple of months ago, which is coming out
Speaker 2: in May, we have a recommendation for how to make
Speaker 2: judgements and the surface and break the problem great each
Speaker 2: aspect of the problem, independently, delay intuition, then look at
Speaker 2: the profile of your ratings and following your judgment. So
Speaker 2: that stayed with me evidently for over sixty years.
Speaker 1: That's incredible. So the start of your psychology career in
Speaker 1: a way showed you that there is a then intuition
Speaker 1: can be spot on.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know.
Speaker 1: That's that's that's really uh, that's that's really cool. And
Speaker 1: then we're gonna we're gonna get to that later, the
Speaker 1: intelligence of intuition for sure. So just to kind of
Speaker 1: wrap up this early part of your life, after you
Speaker 1: got your then you went and got a PhD right
Speaker 1: from Berkeley, and your dissertation was advised by Susan Irvin
Speaker 1: and examined relations between adjectives and the semantic differential. And
Speaker 1: also you got a chance to do Fortron programming. I
Speaker 1: think that you. I think you enjoyed it. I remember Pascal,
Speaker 1: I think with programming in my childhood, but even before
Speaker 1: Pascal was Fortron, right, so that was even before my
Speaker 1: before Tron was the.
Speaker 2: Very first language that was accessible to non programmers. It
Speaker 2: was a compiled language, but it was very very basic,
Speaker 2: and I was actually, I think in the first or
Speaker 2: second course that was ever given to sort of civilians
Speaker 2: on the use of Fortramp was given at my nineteen sixty.
Speaker 2: It lasted a week and that's where I learned Fortran one,
Speaker 2: which was really that's when it that's when it began.
Speaker 1: It's the beginning, that's the beginning my.
Speaker 2: Thesis program, which so I spent most of the effort
Speaker 2: was programming. It could take twenty minutes on the Berkeley mainframe,
Speaker 2: and I could watch the Berkeley mainframe. You could watch it,
Speaker 2: you know, from a window, and there were nine large
Speaker 2: tape units and my program used them all and I
Speaker 2: could tell whether the program was working by whether the
Speaker 2: tapes were working in the proper sequence. Just think of
Speaker 2: what it was then that with the Berkeley mainframe, the
Speaker 2: main computer at the University of California in Berkeley, and
Speaker 2: think of your iPhone today. So that's that's what's happened
Speaker 2: in my lifetime.
Speaker 1: Well, we definitely have come a long way. It'll be
Speaker 1: interesting to see where it is, like sixty years from now,
Speaker 1: if it's going to be the same exponential rate. So
Speaker 1: your early work focused on visual perception and attention. Your
Speaker 1: first post was at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty one. How did you make a shift from
Speaker 1: visual perception and attention, which are you know, staples of
Speaker 1: the cognitive science field. I was trained in that everyone
Speaker 1: in cognitive science peach that you start with that, you know,
Speaker 1: I feel like, and then how did you move into
Speaker 1: judgment decision making. I believe that was when you when
Speaker 1: you met U Tavski, right, yeah, I.
Speaker 2: Mean Amastrski was a young colleague of mine at tab University,
Speaker 2: were three years younger, and he was known to everybody
Speaker 2: as the most brilliant person. And I invited him as
Speaker 2: a guest in a seminar that I was teaching, and
Speaker 2: he gave a talk in that sweminar on work not
Speaker 2: that he had done himself, on work that was being
Speaker 2: done at Michigan at the time, on the study that
Speaker 2: was called the Study of Intuitists Decisions, and the conclusion
Speaker 2: of that study was people are pretty good intuitive statisticerence.
Speaker 2: So that's that's the work that he described. And I
Speaker 2: had been teaching statistics, and I had had experiences about
Speaker 2: how miserable people are, including myself, as intuitive statisticians. So
Speaker 2: I knew this was wrong. And Israelis have a style
Speaker 2: of debating that is world famous. It's quite merciless, and
Speaker 2: so I engaged mostly in that debate in front of
Speaker 2: the class, and it turned out to be a very
Speaker 2: good conversation. I think I want that debate because that's
Speaker 2: what started our joint work, which was basically questioning into
Speaker 2: it statistics. So that's and then we became very close
Speaker 2: friends and.
Speaker 1: The rest is history, so to speak.
Speaker 2: Yeah, in a way, I mean, it turned out that
Speaker 2: this was a very important friendship. We dominated our lives
Speaker 2: for you know, ten twelve years. We spent hours every
Speaker 2: day together a nuts and there was really no no
Speaker 2: separation between work and fun because work was so much fun.
Speaker 2: And the study of because of the topic that they
Speaker 2: had chosen. The topic that we had chosen was incorrect
Speaker 2: intuitions and our subjects, we were our own subjects, so
Speaker 2: we were looking for cases in which our own intuitions
Speaker 2: were flawed. And that is a sort of ironic and
Speaker 2: sort of very funny. And Amoson really extraordinary sense of humor,
Speaker 2: and he loved laughing, and he made me laugh and
Speaker 2: he made me he improved my sense of humor, so
Speaker 2: I made him laugh. We left a lot, and that
Speaker 2: was very happy.
Speaker 1: It's beautiful. So let me just get this straight. So
Speaker 1: when you're in this meeting and you challenged him a
Speaker 1: little bit about the positive aspects of intuition, was were
Speaker 1: you drawing in your intuition to say that intuition isn't
Speaker 1: as positive as he's made it out to be or
Speaker 1: were you basing it on some other conclusion.
Speaker 2: The conclusion of that Michigan research whether that people are
Speaker 2: essentially basian, which means that they make corrected from data,
Speaker 2: except that they are conservative basian, that is, they do
Speaker 2: not they do not draw enough from information. And I said,
Speaker 2: this is absurd in fact, and I cited something that
Speaker 2: they attributed to Denny Kay, who was then a very
Speaker 2: famous comedian. Very little of him remains, but he had
Speaker 2: described a person as a woman, and that's what I remember.
Speaker 2: Turned out later that I mystery remembered some of it.
Speaker 2: But as he said that her famous a favorite position
Speaker 2: is besides herself, and her favorite sport is jumping to conclusions.
Speaker 2: And this idea that people jump to conclusions is, you know,
Speaker 2: when it's obvious that it takes very little for us
Speaker 2: to form a complete image. And that was so clearly
Speaker 2: incompatible with the idea of people being conservative Baysian that
Speaker 2: it made that idea seem silly. I think anyway, I
Speaker 2: still think so not everybody in reason. Well, that's that's
Speaker 2: what set us up.
Speaker 1: I love it. You know, you talk about the importance
Speaker 1: of adversarial you called adversarial collaboration. Now, what a perfect
Speaker 1: example of a situation where you formed such a warm
Speaker 1: friendship with someone. Well, this was you know, it wasn't
Speaker 1: that adversarial. It wasn't adversar. Yeah, that's fair enough, that's fair.
Speaker 2: That's from the beginning.
Speaker 1: Well, maybe Gary Kleine fits more into that that that situation,
Speaker 1: so we can we can talk about Gary Klein a second.
Speaker 1: So this is a research that he had. Gary Klin
Speaker 1: had been spending his career basically studying expertise intuition and
Speaker 1: you know, firefighters and other fields and just how right
Speaker 1: they can be when they do rely on their intuition.
Speaker 1: And I think you two thought there were more areas
Speaker 1: of disagreement than there really were when you finally got
Speaker 1: your heads together to write a paper about it. Is
Speaker 1: that right?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, it's it's a fairly complicated story I had.
Speaker 2: You know, as I told you, I had always believed
Speaker 2: that that there is own marvels to intuition. So I'd
Speaker 2: never believed that that there is nothing to it. Uh,
Speaker 2: And in fact I had I remember that they have
Speaker 2: reviewed an early grant application by Gary and which I
Speaker 2: had reviewed favorably when I was still in Jerusalem, very
Speaker 2: long time ago. Uh, and so I invited Gary. I said, look,
Speaker 2: I mean you and I have completely but it would
Speaker 2: seemed to be completely contradictory beliefs. I mean you believe
Speaker 2: in experts, I believe intuition. I question experts. I question intuition.
Speaker 2: We must both be right. Let's find out where we're right.
Speaker 2: So let's find out the boundary whereas intuition good and
Speaker 2: where does it fail? And he agreed. And it's not
Speaker 2: that it was easy. That took us six years. But
Speaker 2: at the end of six years we had we had
Speaker 2: the paper that was I think pretty good, and we
Speaker 2: had a friendship we became. So that was the most
Speaker 2: successful adversarial collaboration of my life.
Speaker 1: Beautiful. Well, can you remind me the title of the paper,
Speaker 1: because I really liked the title when I saw it.
Speaker 2: Baber was a failure to disagree.
Speaker 1: A failure to disagree. I love that.
Speaker 2: It's that expert intuition of failure to disagree. I think
Speaker 2: that's the fine. But a failure to disagree is certainly
Speaker 2: in the time.
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Speaker 1: dot org. I look forward to welcoming you in December.
Speaker 1: You know you had written at one point you said,
Speaker 1: I had limited ambitions. I didn't aspire to great success.
Speaker 1: I was very hard working, but I didn't expect to
Speaker 1: be a famous psychologist. So it's not like you had
Speaker 1: these dreams when you're young, like I'm going to be
Speaker 1: a famous psychologist. You sort of, in a sense, you know,
Speaker 1: fell into these topics and then they captivated your interest
Speaker 1: you and you did great work with them, you know,
Speaker 1: I mean, how would you describe the situation? How are
Speaker 1: you so great?
Speaker 2: Uh? Well, you know, I at that actually feeling that
Speaker 2: my training had been inferior because I had, you know,
Speaker 2: I'd been let loose in Berkeley. I really didn't study systematically.
Speaker 2: I just read and I studied and picked up a
Speaker 2: lot of things. And I remember that when I came
Speaker 2: to Hebrew University, I decided that I would like eventually
Speaker 2: to become a chef for everyone, saying, but first of all,
Speaker 2: have to learn to be a short order cook. And
Speaker 2: so I started as really very limited and very precise
Speaker 2: experimental project and vision, which I continued for several years.
Speaker 2: And I felt I was in training, that I was
Speaker 2: training myself to become an experimental psychologist. And when I
Speaker 2: met almost I mean I was starting me to become
Speaker 2: slightly more ambitious. But I certainly had no I had
Speaker 2: no expectations of any managor success. Now he was already
Speaker 2: a star.
Speaker 1: Mm hmm.
Speaker 2: So he was a star from graduate school and immediately
Speaker 2: recognize usself. I was good, but he was a star.
Speaker 2: And uh, and then together we were I think better
Speaker 2: than he was. I mean, we were far better than
Speaker 2: either of us. And so I was very lucky, so
Speaker 2: is he.
Speaker 1: It sounds like just a special just a really special
Speaker 1: collaboration and once in a lifetime kind of collaboration that
Speaker 1: people be very lucky to find in their careers.
Speaker 2: Oh.
Speaker 1: Yes, I I have a few people like that in
Speaker 1: my life. I want to give a shout out to
Speaker 1: Colin to Young and David Aiden and James Kaufman and
Speaker 1: other researchers. You know, when you get when you get
Speaker 1: these special people, you know in your academic collaborations, you
Speaker 1: know you you want to hold on to them, you know.
Speaker 1: Let's talk about System one versus system too. Could you
Speaker 1: explain to our listeners a little bit about, well, just
Speaker 1: how you would define the difference between the two before
Speaker 1: we really nerd out about this.
Speaker 2: Well, there is a long history in psychology of the
Speaker 2: distinction between automatic processing and control processing. And it started
Speaker 2: out with the studies of search and how you start searching,
Speaker 2: say for a letter for a particular target letter in
Speaker 2: a set of letters, and you do that hundreds and
Speaker 2: hundreds of times, you look for that letter, and eventually
Speaker 2: that letter pops out that you search changes character, it
Speaker 2: becomes something becomes automatic, and this is something that happens
Speaker 2: in skill learning. We learn to drive and then you
Speaker 2: can drive without thinking. You learn to speak a foreign
Speaker 2: language and then you speak it without having to translate
Speaker 2: from your original language. So we had that experience of
Speaker 2: those two modes, and that's been studied fairly extensively, and
Speaker 2: there were many people drawing on that distinction, and the
Speaker 2: terms system one and system too were invented by one
Speaker 2: of these the Oki Spanovich was also interested in the
Speaker 2: field of judgment and decision making, so he was doing
Speaker 2: research using problems that in Mostovskin I had developed. So
Speaker 2: I was familiar with his work, and I really loved
Speaker 2: that distinction between the two because it seemed to resolve
Speaker 2: the controversy in which we had been involved. So we
Speaker 2: did a lot of work on failures of intuitive thinking,
Speaker 2: which were sort of failures of thinking. So we but
Speaker 2: other people found that you could find create variations on
Speaker 2: those problems, or create different contexts in which people could
Speaker 2: solve those problems. So there seemed to be and they
Speaker 2: questioned our conclusions. But it turned out that the distinction
Speaker 2: between system one and system two is very useful in
Speaker 2: this context because what these people had done, who found
Speaker 2: that our errors they could make, as it were, cognitive
Speaker 2: illusions disappear. It's a well known German psychologist, Good Gigorins
Speaker 2: were sort of intellectual adversary on this, and that's this phrase.
Speaker 2: It's a title of benefice paper making cognitivelusions disappear. But
Speaker 2: you can make cognitivelusions disappear by providing cues that mobilize
Speaker 2: control thinking so that you're not blurting out your intuitions,
Speaker 2: but you act truly compute or your reason your way
Speaker 2: to announce, and then con illusions do disappear, they can disappear.
Speaker 2: And so that's what motivated me to adopt that distinction
Speaker 2: as an essential distinction. With that it seemed to resolve
Speaker 2: the controversy so far as I was concerned between a
Speaker 2: good gig Renzer and ourselves. And then there was a
Speaker 2: lot that you could do with that distinction, and eventually
Speaker 2: that became the core of their role. Ten years later.
Speaker 1: This is great, So let's now let's just shift into
Speaker 1: like colleague mode of nerding out at a really deep
Speaker 1: level about this stuff. Because I was my dissertation. I
Speaker 1: was so ensconced in all this work. I loved the
Speaker 1: system one system two distinction as well. I read Robots
Speaker 1: Rebellion by Keith Stanovich and it blew my mind, and
Speaker 1: I realized that the field of intelligence research had completely
Speaker 1: ignored the distinction it had treated. It had never even
Speaker 1: like dawned on intelligence researchers in one hundred years to
Speaker 1: think that maybe we should call some of these system
Speaker 1: one processes intelligence.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: So this was this was so I won't even know
Speaker 1: where I'm coming from. I was just totally scoonched in
Speaker 1: this work. And then started to do some research on
Speaker 1: to see if there are individual differences in an intuitive,
Speaker 1: unconscious system of intelligence of system one. And then when
Speaker 1: I was digging into this research, I started to get
Speaker 1: into all the debates. So some people argue that the
Speaker 1: word system is not correct. Some people say, well, we
Speaker 1: should call it types. So some research said, there's it's
Speaker 1: really type one processes versus Type two processes because it's
Speaker 1: a lot of different types of process under an overall umbrella. Right,
Speaker 1: you have within system one you can have things as
Speaker 1: varied from language learning to social Q learning to esthetic
Speaker 1: intuition in too, et cetera, et.
Speaker 3: Cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there's a whole wide range of things that we're
Speaker 1: labeling them all under or the same, just like it's
Speaker 1: all this System one. And then with System too you
Speaker 1: have a whole pot prairie of different forms of rationality.
Speaker 1: You know Tkeith Stanovitch as he's gone through quite sensibly
Speaker 1: and all through different types of different ways that you know,
Speaker 1: we can use the rationality, use our system too thinking
Speaker 1: to override O intelligence. Yes, so my question is you
Speaker 1: have you stayed up on these these really uh these
Speaker 1: really nerdy debates and where are you do you see merit?
Speaker 1: Kind of Yeah, I think.
Speaker 2: It's a very important debate. Uh, And clearly, uh, there
Speaker 2: is a tradition in psychology that you're not supposed to
Speaker 2: invoke monculie a monculi being little people in the head
Speaker 2: whose behavior explains a person's behavior, and System one and
Speaker 2: System two are homuncula, So there's no question, you know,
Speaker 2: I vary deliberately. In the book that I wrote, Thinking
Speaker 2: Fast and Slow, I tried to get people to appreciate
Speaker 2: the personalities of system one and system Now why did
Speaker 2: I do that? And I explained that in the first
Speaker 2: pages that actually type one and type two is the
Speaker 2: proper terminology because there are broad types of mental activities.
Speaker 2: But when you think of system one and system two,
Speaker 2: you think of them as agents, and the mind is
Speaker 2: specialized for thinking about agents and not about categories. So
Speaker 2: agents have personalities, agents have tendencies, agents take action, agents
Speaker 2: and goals, and we're ready for that. So it makes
Speaker 2: it easier to think about psychology when you think of
Speaker 2: those agents. So type one and type two they call
Speaker 2: for lists, and people are miserable the lists. But people
Speaker 2: are very good for very good apt is, finding routes,
Speaker 2: roots in space, you know, path to go from one
Speaker 2: place to the other. Were specialized for that, and we're
Speaker 2: specialized for thinking about agents. Lists are terrible, and so
Speaker 2: that's why I went to that language quite deliberately. So
Speaker 2: those are fictions. There are no systems in the brain.
Speaker 2: It's just a way of talking. But it's a very
Speaker 2: useful way of talking. But the people who criticized me
Speaker 2: on this, I think they may have had a point
Speaker 2: because a couple of days ago I was talking to
Speaker 2: undergraduates at Cornell who had questions about my book, and
Speaker 2: they were speaking about system on and system two as
Speaker 2: if there were agents in the head. They were not
Speaker 2: thinking that this is an easy way of thinking about
Speaker 2: type one and type which is what I intended. But
Speaker 2: you know, they were asking, what what do system one
Speaker 2: system to do in an inferant, you know, in a
Speaker 2: dog or you know. None of that was what I
Speaker 2: had really intended. So to some extent, there is a
Speaker 2: risk of corrupting psychological thinking by bringing those a monculi
Speaker 2: the risk is real. The risk is real.
Speaker 1: I agree. I agree with both the risk and the benefits.
Speaker 1: And but you know, you see people in the general
Speaker 1: public talking about this, and I noticed that some people
Speaker 1: start to try to just as a shorthand map it
Speaker 1: onto brain systems. Some people actually map it on to
Speaker 1: like left brain versus right brain thinking, And that makes
Speaker 1: my brain want to explode when I see that. You know, no,
Speaker 1: it's not like you know that that's the problem with
Speaker 1: you know, talking about it as two discrete categories, because
Speaker 1: then people think, oh, so all this System one stuff
Speaker 1: is here, all the System two stuff is when there's
Speaker 1: such a very, very different process. Yeah, I think it's
Speaker 1: just important as you do. And I want to give
Speaker 1: you credit for mentioning this in your book. You know,
Speaker 1: to kind of to not to not try to essentialize
Speaker 1: it and not view them as agents. But people will
Speaker 1: do it anyway in the general public who don't know
Speaker 1: all the nuanced, you know, nerdy literature.
Speaker 2: But I think, you know, for professionals, you use that
Speaker 2: language and it helps you think. But you always remember
Speaker 2: that you can translate any anything that you say about
Speaker 2: System one or System too, you can translate into a
Speaker 2: more cumbersome but more accurate formulation Type one and Type two.
Speaker 2: It's just easier to think about.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure. But just that you know, the general
Speaker 1: idea and the robots rebellion. Yeah, the work Keith Stanevich
Speaker 1: did just opened up a portal into my whole thinking
Speaker 1: about fundamental issues of consciousness, of free will. You know,
Speaker 1: I started to really think in grad school. I thought
Speaker 1: I started to think the system to have more free
Speaker 1: will than System one. You know, even just that question
Speaker 1: I wanted talked. I wanted people to talk to me
Speaker 1: about it, you know, like, and you know, what's some
Speaker 1: of your thinking on free will? I mean, I think
Speaker 1: we're probably both agreed that there's no magic free will.
Speaker 1: There's no you know, we believe that, you know, in
Speaker 1: determinism to a certain degree, but that there might still
Speaker 1: be a free will worth wanting and does that and
Speaker 1: if there is, is there any hope for in system
Speaker 1: two or is there any hope for in system one?
Speaker 2: You have found I think the wrong person to talk with.
Speaker 2: Fair Enough, I have the same response to questions about
Speaker 2: free will and about consciousness. I mean, I know that
Speaker 2: people find them very exciting, and somehow I don't, and
Speaker 2: I don't because I don't know what it would look like.
Speaker 2: I don't know what a solution would look like. And
Speaker 2: to raise a problem when you have no idea of
Speaker 2: what you would consider to be a solution, somehow, isn't
Speaker 2: that is something that I'm not attracted to. I understand that,
Speaker 2: you know, brilliant people, many people, people I respect, are
Speaker 2: fascinated by these questions, but somehow they don't speak to me.
Speaker 2: And I can see obviously people feel their free will obviously,
Speaker 2: you know, brain is a physical object and with the
Speaker 2: rule of the throne, and there seems to be a
Speaker 2: tension between this feeling. But and altogether it's a mystery.
Speaker 2: You know, how does feeling work in a world of objects?
Speaker 2: How does consciousness interact with objects? But obviously it's a puzzle.
Speaker 2: But it's a puzzle that I think we have no
Speaker 2: way of even approaching and knowing what it would be
Speaker 2: like to solve. And for some reason, I have that
Speaker 2: block that if I can't imagine a solution, I don't
Speaker 2: want to go into the problem.
Speaker 1: You know, I really appreciate that, and and and and
Speaker 1: we certainly don't need to even go there to say
Speaker 1: things like some system two processes such as cognitive control
Speaker 1: and UH and UH and reasoning and problem solving give
Speaker 1: us more freedom of or more degrees of freedom be.
Speaker 2: A voluntary I mean the basic distinction that I draw
Speaker 2: between system one operations and system two operations. System one
Speaker 2: operations are things you do, and so system two operations
Speaker 2: are things you do, and system one operations happen to you.
Speaker 2: So you know that distinction, if you is, if you
Speaker 2: want to talk in terms of will of the will
Speaker 2: or control obviously System two is control and System one
Speaker 2: is not right.
Speaker 1: As soon as you it's uncontroversial to use, whereas the
Speaker 1: control and freedom, as soon as you start saying free will,
Speaker 1: then the philosophers and the people who care about that
Speaker 1: get all mad because now you've you've entered their their
Speaker 1: realm of lingual sticks. You know that no we're calling
Speaker 1: free will is determined it, you know, for magical free will.
Speaker 1: So from going back to the big bang and it's like, okay,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry, yeah, so fair enough. Well, well here's a
Speaker 1: topic I think does interest you. Because you reached out
Speaker 1: to me Abou's eight eight years ago or so, I
Speaker 1: was so deeply touched. I want you to know that
Speaker 1: I almost fell off my chair. Actually, I was sitting
Speaker 1: on my bed when I read your email, and I
Speaker 1: said at the end, I got to the bottoms of
Speaker 1: Dane o'connam and I almost fell off my bed. I
Speaker 1: can't believe I got an email out of the blue from.
Speaker 3: Danna co but but but it was.
Speaker 1: It was in relation to my dissertation work on the
Speaker 1: fact that there may be individual differences in System one.
Speaker 1: And I'd love to talk to you about individual differences
Speaker 1: because I know it's not a topic that you've devoted
Speaker 1: your career to, but I believe you said to me
Speaker 1: that if you could do a second career, you might
Speaker 1: actually start to do some individual differences work. Is that right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I'm not truly working on an individual difference with these.
Speaker 3: Days amazing, let's talk about it.
Speaker 2: Late in life. I've turned to that wonderful I belong
Speaker 2: with team that is trying to understand the famous cognitive
Speaker 2: reflection test. Then the bat and ball problem must be
Speaker 2: familiar to all your listeners and trying to understand the
Speaker 2: bat and ball problem. And Shane Frederick, who is the
Speaker 2: sort of the found of that whole line of research,
Speaker 2: he did that actually when he was a post stop
Speaker 2: with me and we were writing a paper together which
Speaker 2: was the first effort to distinguish system one and system two.
Speaker 2: That's where we introduced the notions of the system one
Speaker 2: and system two. And it's a key example the system
Speaker 2: one and system two because I say a bat and
Speaker 2: a ball together cost a dollar, then the bad cost
Speaker 2: a dollar more than the ball how much the ball costs,
Speaker 2: and you have an association and the association and expenses,
Speaker 2: and you solve that problem as if you were said
Speaker 2: a dollar ten is a dollar more then sense. That's
Speaker 2: that seems to happen. Now, it turns out they're very
Speaker 2: interesting individual differences. And some people fail that problem because
Speaker 2: they fail problems. So that's a lack of aptitude of
Speaker 2: one kind or another. But there is an interesting class
Speaker 2: of people who fail that problem although they could easily
Speaker 2: solve it. So fifty percent of Harvard students say ten cents. Now,
Speaker 2: clearly if they bothered to check, they would know that
Speaker 2: they made a mistake. And almost all of them, they
Speaker 2: spent a minute or two would solve that problem. And
Speaker 2: sow it's five sents. So what do we learn. We
Speaker 2: learn they don't check that as we learn that their
Speaker 2: system to accept the immediate association of system one. And
Speaker 2: so there is that class of people who could solve
Speaker 2: the problem but don't. And they're a very interesting group
Speaker 2: of people. So they also tend to believe in conspiracy theories.
Speaker 2: They tend to believe in bullshit of all kinds. They
Speaker 2: are different from other intelligent people in multiple ways.
Speaker 1: You know, something I think that's worth bringing up here
Speaker 1: is Seymour Epstein's distinction between the experiential mind and the
Speaker 1: rational mind. I had the great pleasure of having Seemer
Speaker 1: Epstein on my podcast a couple of years ago, and
Speaker 1: he felt, quite frankly, he felt as though his dual
Speaker 1: process theory had not gotten as much attention as he
Speaker 1: wished it could have. So, out of honor to him,
Speaker 1: who he's no longer with us, I wanted to bring
Speaker 1: this up because I think there was a lot of
Speaker 1: merit in his work linking the experiential mind to superstition
Speaker 1: and to conspiracy theories and all sorts of things. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to hear some of your thoughts he had.
Speaker 2: He had every reason to be upset with people, including
Speaker 2: and certainly with me, because I don't think I mentioned
Speaker 2: his work in Thinking Fast and Slow, and I certainly
Speaker 2: should have done, because it was relevant, it was creative,
Speaker 2: but I actually did not know enough and I didn't
Speaker 2: think of including it. So he was absolutely right. Had he,
Speaker 2: in fact, I think, had been there with that distinction,
Speaker 2: which is one of those dichotomies that were that people
Speaker 2: were working on in the eighties and nineties. It had
Speaker 2: been there early, I think before the system one system
Speaker 2: two distinction was was forming through. And he had some
Speaker 2: brilliant examples of it. It's a beautiful example of that.
Speaker 2: That well, similar to the kind of thing that damas
Speaker 2: Uski and I had done that he attributed to the
Speaker 2: experiential the mode of thinking. So yes, that is a
Speaker 2: really great I have which is not not doing more
Speaker 2: with his work in my book, because.
Speaker 1: That's really that's incredibly gracious of you to say that
Speaker 1: I formed like a friendship with him in the last
Speaker 1: couple of years of his life. And he actually asked
Speaker 1: me if i'd write the foreword to his to his
Speaker 1: book on the on the summarizing his life's work. So
Speaker 1: I hope that I honored it. He seemed to be
Speaker 1: happy with the with the foreword, so it just it
Speaker 1: made it made me happy to see him feel as though,
Speaker 1: you know, even.
Speaker 2: I heard that he felt agreed. Uh and and and
Speaker 2: I'm sorry about my part.
Speaker 1: Well, that's incredibly gracious view. It's it's obviously not just
Speaker 1: it's not you, it's it's a whole you know, system
Speaker 1: of assist like using the word system, but of there's
Speaker 1: so many profiation of different dual process theories. You know,
Speaker 1: someone wrote a review of like forty to fifty different
Speaker 1: dual process theories. You can't you know, you can't to
Speaker 1: be fair to you for a second. It's not like,
Speaker 1: you know, you can write about every single one and
Speaker 1: all the different nuance when you're to write a popular book,
Speaker 1: you know.
Speaker 2: So yeah, yeah, so I just adopted that tominology. In fact,
Speaker 2: I described my interpretation with those systems are I didn't
Speaker 2: try to do justice to the intellectual history of it.
Speaker 2: But he really had made contributions that I you know,
Speaker 2: if I had thought more carefully, I could have included
Speaker 2: than I didn't.
Speaker 1: Beautiful. I'm touched by even your response to that. So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's just like the individual differences aspects. So there is
Speaker 1: this is the insight I had, and I want you
Speaker 1: to tell me what you think of this. In my dissertation,
Speaker 1: there just was so much of a focus on individual
Speaker 1: differences and system two. I mean, Keith Danovich it's all
Speaker 1: the individual system too. And he and Keith Stanach had
Speaker 1: a line in one of his papers where he said
Speaker 1: individual difference system one or minimal or just not even
Speaker 1: worth considering. So I said, I was like, oh, hell no,
Speaker 1: you know, I'm working my dissertation and this is what
Speaker 1: I wanted to directly challenge my dissertation I feel like
Speaker 1: this area of individual differences in system one has really
Speaker 1: been long neglected in the field of cognitive science.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: I found that that they're in pus A learning. For instance,
Speaker 1: your ability to probabilistically we're in the rule structure of
Speaker 1: the very complex rule structure of the world was correlated
Speaker 1: almost zero with IQ. So you have people who have
Speaker 1: conscious ability to detect patterns who aren't terribly necessarily good
Speaker 1: necessarily it's it's zero correlation, So it can go either way,
Speaker 1: you know, with their ability to unconsciously detect complex patterns.
Speaker 1: I thought that was interesting.
Speaker 2: What do you think, well, I think it is very interesting.
Speaker 2: The question that I was impressed by. I was thinking
Speaker 2: system mons slightly differently than you did in my concern
Speaker 2: with individual differences when I approached you. And this, for me,
Speaker 2: system one is where we have representations of the world,
Speaker 2: so that our model of the world is in associative memory,
Speaker 2: and that for me is in the essence of system one.
Speaker 2: And clearly some people have people are very different models
Speaker 2: of the world. Some of them are more accurate than others,
Speaker 2: some are richer, some are poorer, and there are all
Speaker 2: those individual differences in the representation of the world that
Speaker 2: people form and maintain and use to simulate the world
Speaker 2: or to make predictions what will happen, to generate explanations
Speaker 2: of what could happen. There must be individual differences in that,
Speaker 2: and I didn't find any adequate treatment of that aspect,
Speaker 2: of the richness aspect. You're absolutely right. The detecting patterns,
Speaker 2: which is what you were focused on, would be part
Speaker 2: of that general problem, and I was interested in forming patterns.
Speaker 1: Makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 2: I think.
Speaker 1: I think part of the bias in the field is
Speaker 1: that is the field has a bias towards scientific reasoning
Speaker 1: as the pinnacle of human achievement. And what bothered me
Speaker 1: is that arts achievement was really neglected. And so what
Speaker 1: I wanted to do was open up this whole world
Speaker 1: to individual differences in the experiential mind being linked to
Speaker 1: artistic and esthetics and so and it did so when
Speaker 1: I found these individual differences, I found there were linked
Speaker 1: to opens to experience, the personality trait, which then opened
Speaker 1: up the whole world of creativity and the arts and
Speaker 1: all these things that like you know that I feel
Speaker 1: the judgment and reasoning literature is they're not terribly excited
Speaker 1: about they're not excited about this arts the arts, you know.
Speaker 2: Do you know what I mean? I think that's very interesting,
Speaker 2: and you're absolutely right. It's it's very largely neglected. And yeah,
Speaker 2: and that whole tradition of work on thinking and reasoning
Speaker 2: and judgment and decision making. Uh, it's really although it
Speaker 2: doesn't believe in logic as an explanation of psychology, but
Speaker 2: it's infused with it's a reaction to logic. It's always
Speaker 2: logic is always there, and the kind of thing that
Speaker 2: you're talking about, logic isn't even there.
Speaker 1: And that's okay, And that's okay, it's almost there was
Speaker 1: such a bye. I felt that there was this meta
Speaker 1: bias in the bias literature towards like emotions are always
Speaker 1: that's well, that's bad. We've got to count all the emotions. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you're absolutely But thank you for having that
Speaker 1: that conversation, because I've been wanting to kind of really
Speaker 1: nerd out with you at that level of specificity. So
Speaker 1: let's move into hedonism or hedonic psychology. Let's move into
Speaker 1: herdonic psychology. So that is the work you started doing
Speaker 1: in the nineties when you're kind of moving from judgment
Speaker 1: decision making too to this Why how did you move
Speaker 1: into that area? Was it was it did Ed Diner
Speaker 1: influence you at all?
Speaker 2: No? No, okay, I moved into that area because of
Speaker 2: the puzzle. The puzzle uh that that came up when
Speaker 2: Emerson and I were working on the decision making prospect,
Speaker 2: the publisher prospect theory, which deals with the curvature of
Speaker 2: utility functions or value functions, that we don't respond linearly
Speaker 2: to amounts of money, but that the response changes. That is,
Speaker 2: a difference of one hundred dollars makes a very big
Speaker 2: difference if you have one hundred dollars in terms of
Speaker 2: two hundred, But if you have ten thousands and it's
Speaker 2: ten thousand one hundred, the difference is psychologically much smaller.
Speaker 2: So there is that basic psychophysical fund But I posed
Speaker 2: the following puzzle. I said, suppose you are supposed to
Speaker 2: get injections, painful injections in the buck one a day,
Speaker 2: and you don't habituate to that they are painful to
Speaker 2: the same degree. Now, how much would you pay to
Speaker 2: reduce the number of injections from twelve to two and
Speaker 2: from twenty to ten? Would you pay the same amount,
Speaker 2: and the intuition is you wouldn't pay the same amount.
Speaker 2: The intuition is you would pay more to reduce from
Speaker 2: twelve to two than from twenty to ten, because psychologically
Speaker 2: it's a bigger difference. But that's ridiculous because the amount
Speaker 2: of pain that you're adding by by construction is the same.
Speaker 2: So in both cases you're saving yourself ten days of
Speaker 2: pain exactly the same. So that turns out. It turns
Speaker 2: out that the logic of think when you think about
Speaker 2: experiences doesn't fit the logic when you think about making
Speaker 2: decisions and about numbers. So that was the puzzle that
Speaker 2: led me into studying experience. So, and that's another way
Speaker 2: of looking at the basic concept of utility in economics
Speaker 2: and in sort of decision theory. Utility is infilled from choices,
Speaker 2: from preferences. But thinking of utility at the utility as
Speaker 2: an experience that was non existence in the field. I mean,
Speaker 2: Bentham had those ideas centuries ago, but in the field
Speaker 2: of decision making, that idea was absent and absolute in economics.
Speaker 2: So that's that's how I got to.
Speaker 1: Well, that is really cool and uh and and it
Speaker 1: just it's just fixed the whole like there were a
Speaker 1: whole bunch of influence of things of that was like
Speaker 1: in the air because a Diner started soon after started
Speaker 1: studying life satisfaction as even before or even before it
Speaker 1: wasn't okay.
Speaker 2: You know, Dina had been in the field of well
Speaker 2: being a long time, the eighties, his entire career. He's
Speaker 2: the younger than I am, but not by whom. But yeah,
Speaker 2: in the early eighties he had a classic review, so maybe.
Speaker 1: Gotcha.
Speaker 2: But I moved into experiences of episodes like, you know,
Speaker 2: an episode of a medical procedure, an episode of watching
Speaker 2: a pleasant or unpleasant film that lasts a few minutes.
Speaker 2: How do you evaluate experiences? And from there I got
Speaker 2: to the study of well being.
Speaker 1: So that was the that I well, it was an
Speaker 1: important bridge and it was an important distinction that it's
Speaker 1: what allowed us to see this core distinction between the
Speaker 1: experiential self and the remembered self. You know, ed Diner's
Speaker 1: work seems to be the remember itself. You're taking a
Speaker 1: self report questionnaire and it's saying, overall, how happy are
Speaker 1: you with your life? And you're trying to reflect back
Speaker 1: on it. You know, in a lot of ways you
Speaker 1: were kind of bringing some of the even like the
Speaker 1: Mehi chick sent me high approach, you know, like you
Speaker 1: developed another one. He did experience sampling, but I believe
Speaker 1: you developed another technique that was really cool.
Speaker 2: By the way, had that distinction. He described well being
Speaker 2: as being satisfied with your life, having positive affect, a
Speaker 2: lot of positive effect and very little negative effect. So
Speaker 2: that was his concept. I came to that distinction between
Speaker 2: the two completely independently, really, but Ed had had it,
Speaker 2: and like the entire field was focused on life satisfaction,
Speaker 2: that is the measures. The idea of measuring well being
Speaker 2: by measuring experience that that was really largely absent. Now
Speaker 2: six and behind had done experienced sampling, so he had
Speaker 2: studied that, but it was not perceived as a measure
Speaker 2: of well being. It was not an And that's where
Speaker 2: the work that we did came in.
Speaker 1: This is great, thank you for helping like talk me through.
Speaker 1: So I get all the timelines right. I wanted to
Speaker 1: get it right. I wanted to get right. So that
Speaker 1: makes a lot of sense to me. Okay, Then Martin
Speaker 1: Selgman he comes into the picture. Okay, So nineteen ninety
Speaker 1: eight he starts this field positive psychology. So do you
Speaker 1: you've had some criticisms of the field of positive psychology.
Speaker 1: I'd love to hear what some of your current thinking is,
Speaker 1: because I because I do think the field has evolved.
Speaker 1: I think the field did start out mostly focused on
Speaker 1: happiness and and and subjective well being, but has now expanded.
Speaker 1: Do you have researcher studying meaning the science of meaning connections?
Speaker 1: You know, very various, you know, multi dimensional aspects of
Speaker 1: the of the overall well being construct. So so I'm
Speaker 1: wondering where you are today and your your own thinking
Speaker 1: about the field.
Speaker 2: So I was interested in the fact that there are
Speaker 2: those two definitions of happiness. I mean, one of them
Speaker 2: is life this action, and the other is the average
Speaker 2: level of affect in your experience. And actually you can
Speaker 2: measure them independency without going into detail, and they depend
Speaker 2: on different things. So the quality of experience, the average
Speaker 2: quality of your experience, really depends primarily on social context
Speaker 2: and on love and on how much time you spend
Speaker 2: with people you love. And that's those other things that
Speaker 2: determine emotional happiness. Life satisfaction is determined much more conventionally
Speaker 2: by a success by how much you achieve relative to
Speaker 2: and that's income and education and prestige, and they contribute
Speaker 2: and sort of living a conventionally successful life. That is,
Speaker 2: to be married, to have children, not to be divorced,
Speaker 2: not to be involved in litigation, stuff like that. That's
Speaker 2: life satisfaction. So I was interested in that distinction, which
Speaker 2: is not the same distinction as between meaning and well being.
Speaker 2: So that's right. So I never did much with the
Speaker 2: meaning of life in a way it's related to the
Speaker 2: issue of consciousness that we were talking about speak to me.
Speaker 2: But the main that is when I was thinking, because
Speaker 2: I started out interested in experience, that the meaning of
Speaker 2: life is part of life satisfaction, which I thought was secondary.
Speaker 2: And now several people, including Paul Dolan in the UK,
Speaker 2: who was my post doctor, have tried with some success,
Speaker 2: I think limited success, to say that people have experience
Speaker 2: of meaning in real time, and that's an interesting issue.
Speaker 2: My focus on this and well, what happened to me
Speaker 2: first was that I thought that experience is really the
Speaker 2: definition of well being, and that what people think about
Speaker 2: their lives, doesn't you know, that's an epi phenomenon. Secondary.
Speaker 2: It turned out that I couldn't be right, because what
Speaker 2: people want in their life. The decisions they make have
Speaker 2: very little to do with how happy they're going to be.
Speaker 2: They're searching for life satisfaction. So to have a definition
Speaker 2: of well being that doesn't correspond to what people want
Speaker 2: for themselves, that wasn't the big success. So I went,
Speaker 2: I just gave up on that. So that's one and
Speaker 2: the other criticism might have of the whole wellbeing movement
Speaker 2: that it's really diametrically opposed in some sense to Selligment's points.
Speaker 2: I think there isn't enough for some misery, that is all.
Speaker 2: And I think that as a social objective for society,
Speaker 2: the maximization of well being is secondary, but minimizing suffering
Speaker 2: is an objective that we get all agree on, and
Speaker 2: as an objective for policy. Instead of setting happiness as
Speaker 2: a measure of policy, setting the reduction of misery as
Speaker 2: an objective for policy would result in very different activities.
Speaker 2: And I think, you know, ethically it's the right thing
Speaker 2: to do. But so that's my response to the currents.
Speaker 1: Will be so first of all, how do you define suffering?
Speaker 1: Let me just ask you that question, like, what do
Speaker 1: you even how do you even operationalize such a thing?
Speaker 2: Well, that there are various ways. So the obvious way
Speaker 2: is experienced samply, where you periodically, you know, you bring
Speaker 2: people on their phone today and to ask them to
Speaker 2: answer a few questions about how they feel right now
Speaker 2: and about what they are doing. We develop the technique
Speaker 2: that we call the day reconstruction method, which is that
Speaker 2: at the end of the day, you sort of recreate
Speaker 2: the story of your day in episodes, and you evaluate
Speaker 2: the emotional tone and you describe the emotions associated with
Speaker 2: each episode, and then you can get an integral of
Speaker 2: the emotions so you can talk about the average emotion
Speaker 2: over the day for individuals. That's that's how you can
Speaker 2: operationalize it. Now, suffering is relatively easy to define because
Speaker 2: you'd say of people that they suffer when they're in
Speaker 2: a state that they would want to escape. So that
Speaker 2: is operational much easier to define than happiness means it's
Speaker 2: wanting to it's wanting this to end. Oh, I want
Speaker 2: to avoid this, I want to escape this. That's suffering
Speaker 2: for me, and it's well defined and it's It turns
Speaker 2: out that you know a few sample in the United States,
Speaker 2: so we did the same thing in France. When you
Speaker 2: look at a lot of people and take the average
Speaker 2: over time. You know, ten fifteen percent of the overall
Speaker 2: time of the population is spent in a negative emotional state,
Speaker 2: and that is very unevenly distributed in the population. A
Speaker 2: minority of people do most of the suffering and the
Speaker 2: illnesses associated with it. Poverty, extreme poverty is associated with it.
Speaker 2: So there are categories of people who do most of
Speaker 2: the suffering and most of the rest of us suffer relatively.
Speaker 2: We vary in how happy we are, and you know,
Speaker 2: but that's that's genetically determined optimism. But there it's easy
Speaker 2: to measure suffering.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I appreciate that clarification. I I I have made
Speaker 1: the point to Marty as as people in his orbit
Speaker 1: call Martin Seligam, and we call Marty because I worked
Speaker 1: with him closely for for five Did you know that
Speaker 1: I ended up working with him five for five years
Speaker 1: after we met in New York. I ran something called
Speaker 1: the Imagination Institute with him. But anyway, I have I
Speaker 1: have made the point often that that one what one
Speaker 1: needs is not just learned hopefulness. They need real hope.
Speaker 1: Like you can't just focus on psychological hope as the
Speaker 1: intervention and and ignore the fact that people need to have.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're languishing in poverty and there's not
Speaker 1: much cues of hope in your environment, we need to
Speaker 1: work on that too. So I definitely agree.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean that's been a very significant predicesm
Speaker 2: I think of positive psychology, which is that, in a
Speaker 2: deep sense, it's a very conservative approach. That is, you
Speaker 2: want to train the way that people feel about their lives,
Speaker 2: but that means you're not trying to train their lives.
Speaker 2: And that's the point that you were making right now,
Speaker 2: I think that you want to change people's lives and
Speaker 2: not yes.
Speaker 1: But but I'm going to add a butt here because
Speaker 1: I think I'm going to try to argue as well,
Speaker 1: there's still value to that research and to the field
Speaker 1: of positive psychology. That couldn't one make the case that
Speaker 1: that that those who getting them above the zero line
Speaker 1: is that that will rise the tide for humanity. You know,
Speaker 1: in a way, analogous argument and debate is happening in
Speaker 1: the gifted education field and education, so you could, I think,
Speaker 1: perhaps extrapolate your argument to the to that field and say, well,
Speaker 1: we really should focus all of our resources on remediation,
Speaker 1: on helping the students who are most poor poor, uh
Speaker 1: and and those who lack educational opportunities. But couldn't one
Speaker 1: argue that that it's a false dichotomy that we should
Speaker 1: be helping both because you know, we don't want those
Speaker 1: who are gifted, you know, students to fall between the
Speaker 1: cracks either because they're ultimately going to rise the tide
Speaker 1: for all of humanity? Is it? What do you what
Speaker 1: do you make of that?
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's I think it's a false dichotomy
Speaker 2: and it's a false analogy, fair enough, because education is
Speaker 2: a resource that to supply, and the question is who
Speaker 2: are we supplying it too? Now, happiness is not a
Speaker 2: results that we supply. I mean, it's not a society
Speaker 2: distributing happiness. So people are living their lives and objectively,
Speaker 2: and the question is how much and what resources and
Speaker 2: what focus we want to put on improving the way
Speaker 2: people feel about their lives or in actually reducing suftwering. Now,
Speaker 2: it's not that I'm against you. Some of my best
Speaker 2: friends are positive psychologists, so I'm not I'm not against
Speaker 2: positive psychology. One of my heroes is Richard Laird in
Speaker 2: the UK.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, that would make him feel You're really good
Speaker 1: to know. I'm going to tell him that you just
Speaker 1: called him one of your heroes.
Speaker 2: I mean, he knows that we're I introduced, actually I am.
Speaker 2: I mean he gives me credit for his career in
Speaker 2: well being because he became interested in well being because
Speaker 2: of me. And I pointed him too. He actually came
Speaker 2: to instant to think about being with me and we
Speaker 2: stay friends.
Speaker 1: Both are both legends. You're what's within say that.
Speaker 2: Again, we were born within ten days.
Speaker 3: I did not know that.
Speaker 1: So yeah, and I know that you're not against the
Speaker 1: field of posit psychology. There's also you know, there's just
Speaker 1: a lot of nuances here that my brain's just going
Speaker 1: off in lots of different directions. So there's also an
Speaker 1: interesting distinction to be made, an important distinction to made
Speaker 1: between the science of well being and the application of
Speaker 1: the science of well being. So certainly you have no
Speaker 1: issue with a good, rigorous science of well being, right.
Speaker 2: And it is possible, And I think this is what
Speaker 2: Richard Laird is doing specifically in the UK. He has
Speaker 2: he has interventions to improve happiness. But but I think
Speaker 2: measurement is in the background. It's going to be evidence
Speaker 2: face and his major contribution to well being has been
Speaker 2: a massive effort to provide cognitive behavioral therapy is large
Speaker 2: government budgets. He's a member of the House of Lords
Speaker 2: and he started at that movement there and had a
Speaker 2: lot of influence on both labor and conservatives and increase
Speaker 2: together with Professor Clark from Oxford, the clinical psychologists, they
Speaker 2: have really trained the face of comnitive behavior therapy and
Speaker 2: greatly improved it. And all of that is very strictly
Speaker 2: evidence based, and so you can do rigorous applied psychology of.
Speaker 1: I actually want to tell you about a paper that
Speaker 1: I wrote with my colleagues Allan Goodman, actually she was
Speaker 1: the lead author, found Goodman, David Disbato, and Todd Kashton.
Speaker 3: What we wanted to do is we wanted to.
Speaker 1: Look because I think a lot of this is a
Speaker 1: measurement issue with solve a problem with self report within
Speaker 1: the field. We wanted to see what is the lead
Speaker 1: and what was the correlation between subjective well being measure
Speaker 1: you know, just simply how satisfy fight with your life
Speaker 1: and the latent factor of all these other kinds of
Speaker 1: tests of uh facets of well being that have been
Speaker 1: developed like meaning and positive relationships and all this. We
Speaker 1: found a point nine nine to eight correlation. But to
Speaker 1: I'll send you the paper, a point nine to eight
Speaker 1: correlation between you know, the standard subjective well being measure,
Speaker 1: a couple of items, and a very very COMPREHENDI the
Speaker 1: latent factor of a very comprehensive battery, a multi dimensional
Speaker 1: of well being. I think it's very very hard in
Speaker 1: this field to rely on self report and and because
Speaker 1: of a lot of issues you've pointed out in your
Speaker 1: own career of retrospective thinking. What you do when you
Speaker 1: take one of these questionnaires is you tend to think,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're in a good mood, or you
Speaker 1: tend to have a good positive evaluation of your life.
Speaker 1: You tend to on average say, oh yeah, everything's good.
Speaker 1: You know, positive relationships are good. Oh yeah, I got
Speaker 1: meaning too, Oh yeah, I got you know. And so
Speaker 1: it's hard, it's really hard statistically to separate out a
Speaker 1: lot of things that we conceptually say are very clear distinctions,
Speaker 1: like meaning and positive emotions. But anyway, we just we
Speaker 1: think there's some real methodological issues here.
Speaker 2: I mean, you know what you're going to do when
Speaker 2: you extract a single factor. From many measures, you are
Speaker 2: going to extract a single factor, and that single factor
Speaker 2: could very well correspond to less satisfaction. But it's the
Speaker 2: same as an intelligence. You have many tests, you can
Speaker 2: extract a single factor, and there are still varieties of intelligence, miracles,
Speaker 2: spatial vocabulary. So the fact that you can extract a
Speaker 2: single dominant actor and find a good measure for it
Speaker 2: really does not exclude the possibility I think, uh, that
Speaker 2: that you could also find discriminations.
Speaker 1: Well, I think, yeah, just data a little further nuanced
Speaker 1: to what we found.
Speaker 3: I mean with with the wait.
Speaker 1: With structural modelings, you know, you can do look at
Speaker 1: different models, and what I think is interesting is that
Speaker 1: like the one factor model of of all these disparate
Speaker 1: things was a better fit than some than than parsing
Speaker 1: them out, you know, in other various ways.
Speaker 2: I haven't seen your paper. I would just say that
Speaker 2: there is a fair amount of research I think that
Speaker 2: indicates that h different circumstances and different personality types are
Speaker 2: associated with different emotions, and so some people are angry
Speaker 2: and other people are depressed, and that both negative states.
Speaker 2: But uh, trying to pull them into one factor. You
Speaker 2: will not deny the difference between You will not deny
Speaker 2: the difference between joy and contentment, because there clearly is
Speaker 2: a difference between pleasure and contentment, and between anxiety and
Speaker 2: depression or anxiety and anger. So there are there are
Speaker 2: varieties of feelings associated, and most of them are clearly
Speaker 2: positive or negative. But but but, but but they are
Speaker 2: multi dimensional.
Speaker 1: So sure, for sure, I I don't want to argue
Speaker 1: they're not multidimensional, but I think it's harder to get
Speaker 1: at it with the self report questionnaires. I guess it
Speaker 1: is the point. I mean, you're doing a retrospective evaluation. Well,
Speaker 1: we need I think we need more of your kind
Speaker 1: of techniques of moment to moment sampling of these various things.
Speaker 2: You know, there is research indicating you know, I uh oh,
Speaker 2: the Stone of the USC who might collaborated twenty years
Speaker 2: ago in the study of well being. He is a
Speaker 2: master in the study of experience sampling, and he was
Speaker 2: one of those who developed the day reconstruction method, which
Speaker 2: is retrospected, and he had good results indicating that actually
Speaker 2: you capture experience quite well if by retrospective judgments of
Speaker 2: experience at the end of the day. Yeah, there's a
Speaker 2: lot of evidence for that, so that if you focus
Speaker 2: people on their emotional experience, so they remember them, I
Speaker 2: mean not perfectly, there are distortions, but on the average
Speaker 2: they remember them. What is very different is when I
Speaker 2: ask you for a general evaluation of your life, you
Speaker 2: are going to do something entirely different. You are going
Speaker 2: to look at your life compare it to other people's life.
Speaker 2: You're not going to analyze your emotional experiences.
Speaker 1: That's really interesting. A lot of this research is asking
Speaker 1: you on your whole thinking about your whole life. You know,
Speaker 1: what is your meaning, what is your positive experiences? And
Speaker 1: now it's really super interesting. The wealth and happiness link
Speaker 1: is another very very interesting one, and you had published
Speaker 1: research showing that above about seventy five one thousand per
Speaker 1: year income, it splits off. So you don't see much
Speaker 1: more return on your investment in terms of the experience,
Speaker 1: but you do see still see increase in life satisfaction.
Speaker 1: Is that the basic finding?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that's a gallop has been studying well
Speaker 2: being since the early two thousand. I was a consultant
Speaker 2: with them, and I was actually instrumental in their adding
Speaker 2: questions about ethic and about emotion to their questionnaires, so
Speaker 2: that they have a measure that allows you that they
Speaker 2: also have a general measure of life satisfaction, the ladder
Speaker 2: of life so called, which is essentially life satisfaction. So
Speaker 2: they have both, and we studied and they have both.
Speaker 2: And I'm Dino was a consultant with them. I was
Speaker 2: a consultant with them. That's that's how it began. And
Speaker 2: in the Gallop data, it's absolutely clear that when you
Speaker 2: look at experience then in the United States, about about
Speaker 2: seventy five thousand dollars, it really flattens. I mean, we
Speaker 2: Angus Deaton, the economists, famous economists, Angus Deaton and I
Speaker 2: did that study where we found absolutely no increase in
Speaker 2: emotional satisfaction beyond seventy five thousand dollars. I think there
Speaker 2: have been data don't find a slight increase, but it's
Speaker 2: clear that there is some inflection and that the curve
Speaker 2: for life satisfaction is different and steeper, and that life
Speaker 2: satisfaction continues increasing beyond that. Now, there has been a
Speaker 2: study recently by killings Worth which shows using different techniques
Speaker 2: and so on, which seems to show of shows that
Speaker 2: emotions keep improving with income. So we have two discrepanty results.
Speaker 2: There is no question that our result is solid and replicable,
Speaker 2: and there is no real explanation so far at the
Speaker 2: discrepancy that is. What happened is that Killing's Worth is
Speaker 2: more recent. I mean, this is something that happens all
Speaker 2: the time in psychology and social sciences. The more recent
Speaker 2: paper is assumed to do justice to everything that happened
Speaker 2: before it, and Killing's Worth interpretation of why his results
Speaker 2: are different from ours is, of course it blains our
Speaker 2: research and that our researchers that. But in fact it's
Speaker 2: perfectly clear that I think he has explanation of the
Speaker 2: discrepancy doesn't hold water. And I have no idea what
Speaker 2: the explament, what the true explanation is, So we'll have
Speaker 2: to look at it more closely.
Speaker 1: But I'm really curious. Yeah, I want to see how
Speaker 1: that gets right, so am I.
Speaker 2: I mean, I'm sure there is an answer, and I'm
Speaker 2: pretty sure we'll find it, but we don't know. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I feel like regardless of whatever the veracity of that
Speaker 1: turns out to be, there still is a deeper truth,
Speaker 1: which is how one spends one's money and one's time
Speaker 1: is going to be a better predictor of one's happiness
Speaker 1: than the specific money that you have above a certain point.
Speaker 1: Isn't that fair to say?
Speaker 2: That is certainly fair to say that how you spend
Speaker 2: your time. So that is a direct implication of thinking
Speaker 2: about emotion, is that whether you spend your time commuting
Speaker 2: or with your children makes a big difference your emotional
Speaker 2: happiness over a day. I mean, you know two days
Speaker 2: that you could two hours each day that you could
Speaker 2: spend this way or that way makes a big difference.
Speaker 2: So that's doubt would be the case.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I would love to talk about your new book Noise. Okay,
Speaker 1: what in the world is the difference between bias and noise?
Speaker 1: And why is noise rarely recognized in conversations about human error.
Speaker 2: Well, when you think of measurements using a ruler to
Speaker 2: measure a line, if you make multiple measurements, they will
Speaker 2: not be accurate, and they will vary, they will not
Speaker 2: be the same from time to time. The average error
Speaker 2: is the bias and they and the variability is noise.
Speaker 2: And so there are clearly that both sources of inaccuracy
Speaker 2: because if bias is zero, but measurements are all over
Speaker 2: the place, they're just on average, they are correct, they're
Speaker 2: still not accurate. Now, there is a way of measuring error,
Speaker 2: of measuring accuracy, which is accepted in all the sciences.
Speaker 2: It's been around for since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Speaker 2: It's associated with Frederick Gauss and and there is that measure,
Speaker 2: particular measure. In that measure, the total measure of error
Speaker 2: is the square of the bias and the square of
Speaker 2: the noise, where noise is measured by the standard deviation.
Speaker 2: So in a theory of error, which is the accepted theory,
Speaker 2: bias and noise have equivalent roles the average error and
Speaker 2: the standard deviation of error. This is something that people
Speaker 2: really don't think about. Now. It's natural for people to
Speaker 2: think of bias because bias is an error, I mean,
Speaker 2: it's it represents something you can imagine what it is.
Speaker 2: Variability is much more harder to represent and much harder
Speaker 2: to think about, and much harder to realize the role
Speaker 2: of variability in inaccuracy in error. So that's bias and noise.
Speaker 2: Now where do you find noise, Because it's a very
Speaker 2: abstract thing. If you look judges looking at the same case,
Speaker 2: their sentences will actually be all over the place, and
Speaker 2: the standard deviation in one of the studies with the
Speaker 2: average sentence with seven years, the standard deviation with three
Speaker 2: point eight. That means that a defendant faces a lottery
Speaker 2: depending on which judge will be assigned her. That is unacceptable.
Speaker 2: There is noise in medicine. There is noise in the
Speaker 2: evaluation of assets. There is noise in the assignment of
Speaker 2: children to foster care. There is noise in patents. So
Speaker 2: there is noise everywhere. So those are differences that should
Speaker 2: not exist. That's variability that should not exist in those systems.
Speaker 2: In addition, there is variability within the individual. That is,
Speaker 2: the same judge will not give the same sentence. Depending
Speaker 2: on temperature. Sentences are harsher on hot days. People assign
Speaker 2: heavier sentences the day after the football team losers. So
Speaker 2: that's that's noise within a judge. Anyway, that's noise, and
Speaker 2: that's what all else. Maybe some book is about written
Speaker 2: with two collaboratives.
Speaker 1: It's it's fascinating and I'm trying to wrap my head
Speaker 1: around this. With like i Q testing and you want
Speaker 1: the signal is you know the true IQ score, and
Speaker 1: you never ever know the true IQ score. You only
Speaker 1: have like a you have a range of in your
Speaker 1: how how uh you know you have confidence intervals? You know,
Speaker 1: how can you? And there are lots of demands you
Speaker 1: talk about in there, But I am really curious in
Speaker 1: double clicking on in UH in personnel selection and kind
Speaker 1: of the use of these standardized tests as well well
Speaker 1: in for college selection. Do you do you see a
Speaker 1: lot of noise in college admissions or.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of noise in college admissions. Yeah, there's
Speaker 2: a lot of noise in hiring. I mean that's well known.
Speaker 2: There's a lot of noise in personal evaluation. I mean
Speaker 2: the conclusion in studies of the evaluations that employees get
Speaker 2: that the ratings that get the ratings are more predictable.
Speaker 2: You can predict ratings better if you know who did
Speaker 2: the rating, then if you know who the at is.
Speaker 3: So that's problematic.
Speaker 2: Noise is generally problematic and frequently completely ignored. It's assumed
Speaker 2: a way. You're right.
Speaker 1: So not that you need me to say you're right,
Speaker 1: but you're right, you're right.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, this is important. This is important.
Speaker 2: I need people to say I'm right on this one.
Speaker 3: No, it's so important.
Speaker 1: We're let's talk about how this relates to the proliferation
Speaker 1: of diversity and inclusion initiatives in hiring practices because they're
Speaker 1: focused on reducing bias, right, But how could they benefit
Speaker 1: perhaps from also considering noise? I thought, I thought about that.
Speaker 2: It turns out that the major source of error in
Speaker 2: many decisions is actually noise and not biased. So, for example,
Speaker 2: you have bail judges who decide whether to keep somebody
Speaker 2: incarcerated or release them before trial. And clearly you want
Speaker 2: to minimize crime, and clearly you want to minimize unnecessary
Speaker 2: incarceration of people. But it turns out when you look
Speaker 2: at it carefully, there are huge differences between judges and
Speaker 2: who they release and who they don't. So there have
Speaker 2: been large scale studies with hundreds of thousands of decisions
Speaker 2: by thousands of judges, which make it very clear that
Speaker 2: a defendant facing a bail decision is facing a lottery,
Speaker 2: as that depends a lot on you know who the
Speaker 2: judge is, and because different judges have different tastes about
Speaker 2: who should get there. From the point of view of
Speaker 2: an organization, suppose you have an organization that is doing hiring. Now,
Speaker 2: if there is a bias, then then of course there
Speaker 2: will be errors. But suppose there is no overall bias.
Speaker 2: I suppose you have an organization that is where half
Speaker 2: of the people who make hiring decisions are biased in
Speaker 2: favor of women and half are biased against them. So
Speaker 2: overall there is no bias, but clearly something is wrong
Speaker 2: with that organization. And what's wrong is noise. So there
Speaker 2: is real bias at the individual level and sometimes at
Speaker 2: the organizational level, and and bias at the individual level
Speaker 2: when the when there are differences between individuals creates. Notice,
Speaker 2: I see, and there is a lot of that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so a different way of framing it.
Speaker 3: I really like this.
Speaker 1: Well, bias is, obviously, we're both agreed, very very important
Speaker 1: to address and to become aware of. But in some
Speaker 1: ways bias can be almost easier to see and as
Speaker 1: as a problem, then.
Speaker 2: Noise can be easy. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that's what we're saying, and that's the
Speaker 1: point about Yeah, I get it, I get it. I
Speaker 1: love it. I'm so glad that you that you you
Speaker 1: put pointed a finger at it. So you talk about
Speaker 1: ways of trying to make this reduce ways of reducing noise.
Speaker 1: You talk about decision hygiene. What are some examples of
Speaker 1: decision hygiene?
Speaker 2: Well, uh, first of all, the concept of hygiene and
Speaker 2: what it's and the idea was to distinguish hygiene from
Speaker 2: medication of vaccination. That is, when you're medicating or vaccinating
Speaker 2: or doing surgery, you're dealing with a specific illness and
Speaker 2: you're trying to combat a specific illness. When you wash
Speaker 2: your hands, you don't know it germs, you're protecting yourself.
Speaker 2: That's hygiene. So and if you're successful, you will never
Speaker 2: know because you won't get the disease. So there is
Speaker 2: a whole category of steps and procedures that you are
Speaker 2: more likely to think about when you think about hygiene.
Speaker 2: When you think about then about noise really and reducing noise,
Speaker 2: then you think when you're trying to minimize bias. And
Speaker 2: an example of hygiene is that when we started with
Speaker 2: when I was describing my work in the Israeli Army,
Speaker 2: that is, when you have a decision problem, instead of
Speaker 2: trying to develop an intuition about the problem as a whole,
Speaker 2: breaking up the problem intwo segments, evaluating each segment in
Speaker 2: a fact based way, and then having a global evaluation
Speaker 2: which can be intuited. That is hygiene. That's an improvement
Speaker 2: that will reduce noise, reduce bias, and improve decisions. And
Speaker 2: there are other steps that belong to decision hygiene, like
Speaker 2: making judgment comparative. So people are we are not very
Speaker 2: good at making absolute judgments how good something is or
Speaker 2: how much money something is worth. We're much better at
Speaker 2: making comparative judgment that this candidate is better than that candidate,
Speaker 2: or this object is worth more than that object. So
Speaker 2: you get much less noise and much more accuracy in
Speaker 2: relative judgments absolute, So trying to switch people to make
Speaker 2: comparative judgements and providing them with comparative scale that are
Speaker 2: easy to use. That's decision that's a stick in decision hype.
Speaker 2: And we have a few more.
Speaker 1: And all this falls in the brail of you know,
Speaker 1: a noise audit. That's I like this idea of a
Speaker 1: noise audit that you go to a workplace and maybe
Speaker 1: they will have noise audit consultants or something someday. You
Speaker 1: know that that could be a new field where you
Speaker 1: go in and armed all it. Oh yeah, all these principles.
Speaker 1: I found the quote that I really liked to illustrate
Speaker 1: the point where we're just talking to about before you
Speaker 1: said bias has a kind of explanatory charisma which noise lacks.
Speaker 1: I love that quote. I love it, yeah, because it's
Speaker 1: so true. A lot of people are talking about bias
Speaker 1: right now, but I just I don't. I don't see
Speaker 1: noise as much on the on the radar.
Speaker 2: That's rue, and the omission is so obvious that we
Speaker 2: wanted to do something about it. That's when the book wonderful.
Speaker 1: You know, how have you just a general couple of
Speaker 1: general questions about your life? You know, how do you
Speaker 1: think you've grown over the course of your life? You know,
Speaker 1: I saw an interview did with Sam HARRISY asked you
Speaker 1: if studying biases your whole life has made you less biased,
Speaker 1: and you said no, not really.
Speaker 3: You said, not really, but but there are.
Speaker 1: There are other dimensions to oneself than their cognitive biases.
Speaker 1: You know, as a whole person. How do you think
Speaker 1: you've grown in your life?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean you change, you developed some wisdom, and
Speaker 2: the wisdom is that the number of things that you
Speaker 2: get very excited about diminishes, and that you look at
Speaker 2: things from a greater distance and with somewhat more objectivity,
Speaker 2: and those things happen with age. I mean, it's not
Speaker 2: just if you live long enough and you don't lose
Speaker 2: your marbles completely, this will happen to you. Ah, this
Speaker 2: is you know, it's growth in a certain sense, but
Speaker 2: it also it's because when you grow old, you also
Speaker 2: become detached and you are less part of the action,
Speaker 2: and you're less involved and you're less relevant, and all
Speaker 2: that enables you too to be wise and detected. So
Speaker 2: it's not all growth, you know, as a very good thing.
Speaker 2: It's also that you are moving from the center of
Speaker 2: the action, and this is inevitable.
Speaker 1: M And with the cognitive biases in particular, you know,
Speaker 1: are there any Are there any that you feel like
Speaker 1: you've really you've really moved and moved the dialon throughout
Speaker 1: the course of your career.
Speaker 2: Of those Yeah, I mean there are a few cognic
Speaker 2: biases that, uh, you can sometimes be aware of that,
Speaker 2: Oh I'm being anchored. You know, somebody is giving me
Speaker 2: that number and that number is affecting my thinking.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: But by and large, it's very difficult when you are
Speaker 2: just making a mistake to become aware that you're making
Speaker 2: a mistake. That really doesn't come naturally, certainly doesn't come
Speaker 2: naturally to me.
Speaker 1: It's an amazing testament to your humility to spend to
Speaker 1: win the Nobel Prize over this and to admit that
Speaker 1: you still have some of these biases yourself, and it
Speaker 1: makes me, inspires me in a way, and it also
Speaker 1: makes me feel hopeless as well.
Speaker 2: I think the latter is appropriate.
Speaker 1: I mean, I've question just about winning the Nobel Prize.
Speaker 1: In what way did winning the Nobel Prize increase your
Speaker 1: happiness in life?
Speaker 2: Oh? You know, in multiple ways. I mean, but I'm
Speaker 2: going to tell you something that people don't realize. I mean,
Speaker 2: the experience of winning that prize. I mean, the thing
Speaker 2: that's most really about that experience is how much pleasure
Speaker 2: it gives to other people. So anybody who will likes you,
Speaker 2: they don't have to like you. Anybody who is connected
Speaker 2: to you feel some pleasure. And you know, this is
Speaker 2: totally unjustified. I mean, there is no logic behind it
Speaker 2: doesn't matter. But the fact is that this is an
Speaker 2: association and people in many other domains, many other successes
Speaker 2: that you have, other people are going to grudge you,
Speaker 2: to be grudge you, or there's going to be some envy.
Speaker 2: For some reason, the Nobel Prize is not one of them.
Speaker 2: At least maybe among your colleagues, but not certainly not
Speaker 2: among So that was the major thing during the first year,
Speaker 2: when I was really conscious of it, with so much pleasure.
Speaker 2: This was giving to everybody around me. That that in
Speaker 2: itself is sort of great happiness, is that you feel
Speaker 2: your sort of people happy. You're making people happy by
Speaker 2: something that is happening to you.
Speaker 3: That was your mother.
Speaker 1: Your mother will tell everyone about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but Danny, my son, Danny got the Nobel Prize.
Speaker 2: You weren't around and but but you know, neighbors would say,
Speaker 2: I mean, and so that's part of it. It's really quick.
Speaker 2: I hadn't anticipated this, but I'm long traded. But the
Speaker 2: initial experience that was very saying. And in general it
Speaker 2: certainly improves life. Fine, I recommend it to everybody. Uh
Speaker 2: it's not uh uh. You know, your credibility increases people people,
Speaker 2: and you get more access to resources, but you mainly
Speaker 2: and you're taken more seriously than you deserve to be
Speaker 2: taken a lot of good things happen, and and there
Speaker 2: isn't much downside if you don't let it sort of
Speaker 2: dominate your life. If you're lively dominate your life, it's
Speaker 2: not good.
Speaker 1: But you know, well, not only dominate your life. I mean,
Speaker 1: to what extent overconfidence could also be a problem. To
Speaker 1: what extent did it? Did it increase your confidence? Were
Speaker 1: you ever insecure before winning the Nobel Prize? Did it
Speaker 1: make you feel more confident?
Speaker 2: Oh? Yeah, I mean I think. Uh, I once heard
Speaker 2: somebody described the experience of being knighted and uh, and
Speaker 2: you had the phrase that really impressed me. He said,
Speaker 2: you don't sweat the small stuff. Uh, that's something happens
Speaker 2: that gives you a different perspective. So it really is
Speaker 2: a matter of luck. But when when that thing happens
Speaker 2: to you, it really changes your life for the better.
Speaker 2: M hmm. It feels quite unfair.
Speaker 1: I feel like everyone should be able to win the
Speaker 1: Nobel Prize at some point in their life to to
Speaker 1: increase their their well being. And yeah, so you know.
Speaker 3: What advice?
Speaker 1: Okay, Well, this is the question was if you were
Speaker 1: if you were just starting out in the field right
Speaker 1: now today, you're you're fresh out of grad school, what
Speaker 1: topic or area would you be most excited to spend
Speaker 1: your career studying.
Speaker 2: Oh? I think today I would go either in brain science,
Speaker 2: into brain science or into artificial intelligiums. Hmm. That's that's
Speaker 2: where I would go because at the moment, that's that's
Speaker 2: where a lot of exciting things seem to be happening totally.
Speaker 1: And there's a whole fascinating literature on bias in algorithms,
Speaker 1: and that's a whole other topic. But you know what
Speaker 1: I mean, that's if you could apply your work to
Speaker 1: that area. What do you see as the next era
Speaker 1: of behavioral economics and behavioral science?
Speaker 2: I have a rule against foecasting. I just don't believe
Speaker 2: people can do it. And you know, I can say
Speaker 2: trivial things about what is happening now and which is
Speaker 2: likely to remain so over the next four or five years,
Speaker 2: but I nobody can predict what happened. And those who
Speaker 2: tell you they can of just eluding themselves.
Speaker 1: Hey, that's an answer in itself. So fair enough, Yeah,
Speaker 1: fair enough. I'm sure you get asked this one all
Speaker 1: the time. But you know, what do you what do
Speaker 1: you think or what do you want your grass legacy
Speaker 1: to be?
Speaker 2: I I think I don't. Uh, you know, I don't
Speaker 2: spend much time thinking about it. Uh. I'm pleased right
Speaker 2: now that I think you know, right, now, I think
Speaker 2: that I would like the idea of noise to capture
Speaker 2: on I would have liked adversarial collaboration to catch I
Speaker 2: think that the way that we can do controversies is
Speaker 2: ridiculous and uh, and something should be done to you
Speaker 2: know what we were talking about with that study of
Speaker 2: well being, where we're getting somebody is getting different results.
Speaker 2: This is really not a way to conduct science. I
Speaker 2: mean to have somebody in and then no contact. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and that happens all the time instead of people saying, oh, look,
Speaker 2: I mean I have a result that doesn't seem to
Speaker 2: fit yours. Let's let's compare notes, let's see, let's talk.
Speaker 2: But you get it's very adversarial and I so I
Speaker 2: had that idea of adversarial collaboration, and I don't think
Speaker 2: it's going to It hasn't had much impact. But I
Speaker 2: wish I love that.
Speaker 1: I wish I saw that more in Congress for instance.
Speaker 1: You know that's a different story, I know, but but
Speaker 1: I wish we just saw that in various different aspects
Speaker 1: of my life. So do you do you have grandchildren? Yes,
Speaker 1: you know, what advice do you give them about, you know, living.
Speaker 3: In this world?
Speaker 1: Moving forward? In the kind of world we're living in
Speaker 1: today in next hundred years, do you have like any
Speaker 1: general sort of wisdom?
Speaker 2: No, of course not. I mean you know I wouldn't.
Speaker 2: I wouldn't there give advice to my grandchildren. I mean,
Speaker 2: all right, you know I can give them advice about
Speaker 2: how to navigate. Well, that's too at school.
Speaker 1: But if that's too broad a question, I can narrow
Speaker 1: it and say, what if what about to aspiring psychologists?
Speaker 1: You know, what advice do you have too? Young psychologists
Speaker 1: are going to the field. Yeah, just general advice for them.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, you know when I I think that
Speaker 2: not getting too attached to your ideas is really an
Speaker 2: important piece of advice. That you have a lot of
Speaker 2: people getting attached from mediocre ideas instead of looking for
Speaker 2: better ones. Uh, that's that I think, HM. And being
Speaker 2: willing to move if things don't work, and not getting stuck.
Speaker 2: That would be my advice. But also consider whether this
Speaker 2: is the life for you, that is academic life has
Speaker 2: you know, because it's it's a better is its benefits
Speaker 2: and its costs, and it's much more suitable for some
Speaker 2: personalities than for others. And it would be good advice
Speaker 2: for some people just don't do this because you're not
Speaker 2: going to be happy and you're not going to be
Speaker 2: as productive as you could be. So that's that I think,
Speaker 2: you know, I think I wrote that in Thinking Fast
Speaker 2: and Slow. But it's that in order to be a
Speaker 2: scientist successful scientist, you have to be a to exaggerate
Speaker 2: the importance of what you're doing. If you cannot exaggerate
Speaker 2: the importance of what you're involved in, you will feel futile.
Speaker 2: And you can see that in order to be passionate
Speaker 2: about what you're doing, you have to think that this
Speaker 2: is the most interesting thing in the whole universe. So
Speaker 2: at least, I mean, I'm exaggerating now, but you have
Speaker 2: to view it as bigger than it really is. And
Speaker 2: not everybody has that characteristic, and some people have it
Speaker 2: too much, you know.
Speaker 1: That's a different story.
Speaker 3: Is there a study that you.
Speaker 1: Wish you had done and didn't you They're like, wow,
Speaker 1: I wish I did this study.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean, you know constantly you have that when
Speaker 2: I read experiments by other people, you know, when I'm
Speaker 2: very impressed.
Speaker 1: You know, I wish, but I guess I'm more a
Speaker 1: study that hasn't been done yet. But you're like, ohhh,
Speaker 1: you know, if I had the resources, if I had.
Speaker 2: Oh you know, there must have been I don't remember that.
Speaker 2: It's not something that I have stought that I had
Speaker 2: that regret about the study I should have done.
Speaker 1: And no, So this is my last question, you know,
Speaker 1: the evaluation of one's life and their satisfaction. Can you
Speaker 1: just give me a you know, just think about your
Speaker 1: life and give me just a retrospective reflection on overall?
Speaker 1: Have you been happy, satisfied, content, et cetera.
Speaker 2: Well, men, you know, I view myself as being extraordinarily lucky.
Speaker 2: So I was, you know, I was lucky. I didn't
Speaker 2: you know, we spoke about the war that I had
Speaker 2: in Europe and so on, but I was lucky. I
Speaker 2: survived and I didn't really suffer hunger, torture. So I
Speaker 2: was lucky then. And I've been lucky all my life.
Speaker 2: I've been mainly lucky in the friends I've had and
Speaker 2: in the collaborations. So that's that's made my life. All
Speaker 2: my work has been social, and I've enjoyed every part
Speaker 2: of it. So it's yeah, that's my main evaluation. I've
Speaker 2: been very fooled.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Danny, for this wonderful chat today
Speaker 1: and for being so inspiring to so many of us
Speaker 1: in the field of psychology as well as the broader public.
Speaker 1: And your humility, your graciousness, your intellect, and your humanity.
Speaker 1: Thank you so much for being on The Psychology Podcast today.
Speaker 2: Thank you, Scott. You embarrassed me, but I forgive you.
Speaker 3: See you don't stop there? Where did I embarres you?
Speaker 3: At what point?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 3: Gotcha? Gotcha?
Speaker 1: Well, I I hear you. I really do mean it
Speaker 1: from the bottom of my heart. So thanks again, Thank you.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast.
Speaker 1: If you'd like to react in some way to something
Speaker 1: you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion
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