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