Hidden Brain - Think Fast with Daniel Kahneman

Episode Date: March 13, 2018

Do humans act rationally? Economic theory has long told us the answer is "yes." But a half century ago, two psychologists — Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky — began to challenge this notion. Their work laid the foundation for behavioral economics and influenced many scholars who've followed in their footsteps. This week, we mark our 100th episode by talking with Daniel Kahneman about his collaboration with Tversky, and how their work transformed our thinking about judgment, memory, and the mind itself.

This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedanta. Economic theory rests on a simple notion about human beings. People are rational. They seek out the best information. They measure costs and benefits, and maximize pleasure and profit. This idea of the rational economic actor has been around for centuries.

actor has been around for centuries. But about 50 years ago, two obscure psychologists shattered these foundational assumptions. The psychologists showed that people routinely walk away from good money, and they explain why once people get in a hole, they often keep digging. The methods of these psychologists were as unusual as their insights. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky spent hours together talking. They came up with playful thought experiments. They laughed a lot. We felt our own mistakes very funny. What was fun was finding yourself about to say something really stupid.

This is Daniel Kahneman, the insights he developed with Amos Tversky who passed away in 1996 transformed the way we understand the mind. That transformation had philosophical implications. The stories about the past are so good that they create an illusion that life is understandable. And that's an illusion. And they create the illusion that you can predict the future. And that's an illusion. Professor Canaman, you're important insights. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002.

The new bridges between economics and psychology are attributed to your pioneering research. We've drawn extensively on research inspired by these two psychologists. So for Hidden Brain's 100th episode, I interviewed Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman. We taped this interview before a live audience at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C. Danny, welcome to Hidden Brain's 100th episode. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, Danny, as I was reading that introduction, I could almost see you cringing because you've spent a lifetime worried about overstatement and exaggeration and overconfidence and luck. And I'm wondering if we could just start there.

If you were to look back at your own life, how much of your success would you attribute to talent and how much to luck? I mean, you know, some talent was really needed. But luck, you know, I can see so many points in my life where luck made all the difference. And mainly the luck is with the people you need and the friendships you make. There is a large element of luck in that. And my life was transformed by sheer luck in finding a partner, an intellectual partner with whom we got along very well and we got a lot done. Before we get to Amos, I want to talk about another person whom you met.

This was in 1941-42. You're a very young Jewish boy living in German-occupied Paris. And one day, you're out beyond curfew. An SS officer spots you and runs up to you. What happens next? Well, he doesn't run up to me, but he beckons me to him. And I was wearing a sweater. It was past the curfew, and my sweater had a yellow star on it,

and so I was wearing it inside out. And he called me, and he picked me up. And I was really quite worried that he might see my yellow star. And he hugged me tight, and then he put me down, he opened his wallet, and he showed me a little boy. And then he gave me some money, and we went also for it was. Obviously, I reminded him of his son. And he wanted to hug his son, so he hugged me.

That's an experience. It was some reason, I mentioned it in my Nobel autobiography, but as illustrating a theme that was a theme in my family, actually, and my mother, especially, that people are very complicated. And that seemed to be an instance of something very complicated. And so it stayed that, you know, in that sense, it's a memory that was important to me. So when an event like that happens, I can imagine most people just saying,

thank God, and moving on, but you found it interesting partly because you said there's something interesting that happened here. And from a very young age it seems you were drawn to these curiosities about how the mind worked. In some ways the SS officer was making a mistake. He was looking at you and drawing an association from you to sort to another child, maybe his own son. And of course in many ways it was an error. The mind was not working in a quote unquoteunquote rational fashion, but it was more associated. The complexity was that it's the combination of somebody who must have done some very evil things

and have thought some very evil thoughts. And yet he was hugging me. And I mean, you know, that kind of complexity was everywhere. I mean, Hitler, you know, like children and like flowers and was very kind to some people. So we have a lot of difficulty putting that together with, you know, the things he did. But that complexity was always interesting. At what point do you feel you became the person

who was paying attention to his own thoughts? Because so many of your early insights were developed obviously in experiments that you ran on people, but you were also observing the way your own mind worked and observing if you will oddities in the way that your own mind worked. Was that always the case with Danny Conneman? I think so.

I mean, I wrote a psychological essay when I was 11. So it was short. But I'll tell you what the essay said, actually, because it shows quite a few things, I think. But so my older sister was taking exams at philosophy. And I had read some Pascal, and you know, Pascal explained why he gave proofs of God's existence. Pascal said that faith is God made sensible to the mind. And a little boy of 11, very pompous, of course, I said, how right. And then the psychological part was, I said, but this is very hard.

The experience of faith is very rare. And so that's why we have churches and organs and pomp to sort of, and I called it, Erzats, I mean, sort of fake experience, to generate a fake experience. So that was, you know, that was psychology. And obviously, you know, that's what interested me then, and it's interested me since. Later on, as you were working as a professional psychologist now, you made in some ways a career of thinking about how your own mind worked. And I'm fascinated by this idea because in some ways,

a lot of people look at how their minds work and they're defensive about it, or they defend how their minds work, or they say, no, what I did was most made perfect sense. And instead in some ways, I think it, your humility, and clearly it's a temperamental quality of yours, helped you to sort of see some of these oddities and think about why they happen. That's not quite the way it happened, actually. I had my friend and collaborator, Emma said, we worked together on that, and nobody ever accused him of being humble.

He was not. But what the two of us did, we found our own mistakes very funny. And so we had a lot of fun, just exploring what is our first impulse when it's wrong. And that can be an endless source of fun. There was no particular humility on the contrary in a way. That is, we never thought that people were stupid because we were finding all of that in ourselves and we didn't think we were stupid. So there was very little humility there, but there was irony. And the irony was part of the

funny. What was funny about it? I can see why it was interesting or why it was curious, but I understand that when you and I must work together, there was just endless amounts of hilarity. There was a lot of laughter. And you know, what was what was fun was finding yourself fun was finding yourself about to say something really stupid and you know having and sort of holding, holding back because you know better but it's that impulse to say things that you know that are without basis or that are purely associated and really it doesn't matter't matter how intelligent you are, or how educated you are. There are those intuitions,

or those thoughts that come from somewhere, that come very reliably and predictably, and that are wrong. So it's a big feel to study. Well, meaning Amos was clearly a stroke of luck. I mean, I don't think your life would have taken the same path that it did. Certainly not.

I mean, you know, it's rare really, but he was exceptionally smart and very, very quick. And there is, when you have two people who are working together who really, in a way, love each other's mind and admire each other's mind. That is very special because it gives you a sort of confidence when the other, you say something and the other person sees something in it that you haven't seen. And this is very rare.

That's this kind of mutual trust and looking for what's interesting and good in what the other person is saying. And both TNI, we were both quite critical people. I mean, he even more than I, but we made an exception for each other. And that was a joy. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, Lane the Ground groundwork for what is today known as behavioral economics. In 2002, Daniel Kahneman was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. So many of your early insights were based

on thought experiments where you came up with very simple questions that you posed to both yourselves and to other people. Why do these thought experiments? And when we talked a few days ago, you actually said that this is part of the reason you think that your work appealed to a larger audience, because even if the ideas were complex, the questions were inherently interesting and accessible.

Well, that's a stroke of luck, really. In, there's a famous psychologist, Walter Michel, who wrote a book on the Marshmallows, a few years ago. And in 1964, he published his dissertation. And his dissertation was done in Jamaica with small children, and he asked those children two questions. And one of them was, there is a fairy who can make a view whatever you want to be, what you want to be.

And the other question was, you can have this lollipop today, or two lollipops tomorrow, what do you prefer. Now, these two questions were correlated with everything inside. I mean, they were correlated with how bright the trial was, with how educated the parents were. And I just fell in love with that idea of the psychology of single questions. And I looked for ways to do that sort of thing. And the work with Amos on judgment turned out

to lend itself to just that. That is, there is a single question that elicits a funny thought, and it makes a point. And you know, in the first place, we were very lucky in the choice of problem. There are just no other problems in psychology that lend themselves to that sort of thing, that you can involve the reader and present questions to the reader and you make the reader think. So you can do that in vision and everybody here I'm sure has had introductory psychology

at some point and there are those demonstrations of perceptual effects like figure ground or... Optical and perceptual... ...perceptual organization and so on. or the other round, or the process of reorganization, or... And they are on the page, and that's the phenomenon. You are your own subject. Now, you can do that on vision, you can do that on judgment, which is the field that we did it in. And that's it.

You can't do it on self-control, you can't do it on many other things, you can't do a personality study. So when I was talking of luck, that's luck to hit on something that, you know, we happen to be prepared for, and that is uniquely, lend itself uniquely to something that creates experiences in readers, you know, sheer luck. creates experiences in readers, you know, sheer luck. So after many, many years of collaboration together, your partnership with Amos founder, I think it's fair to say, I'm wondering whether you've given the same thought to why that happened, that you gave to other things that your mind does, and whether those insights,

I mean so many of your insights about how your mind has worked have helped the rest of us, is there anything here that could help the rest of us think about collaboration and partnership? No, I mean, you know, there's natural stresses in collaboration. The world is not kind to collaborations. You know, when you have two people who are reasonably talented and they work together and they overlap closely then I'm quoting Amos he said when I give a lecture people don't think I need anybody else to do the work and that was true to some extent of me as well and so

that's creates stresses. And of course, I've given a lot of thought to it. We were fortunate that we went on as long as we did. We were fortunate that we remained friends, even when there were stresses in the collaboration. I remember research that Abraham Tesser did many years ago, where he looked at couples or other pairs of people who are very similar to one another.

And one of the things he found is, of course, the closer in similarity people were, the more they reached for the same goal. You had, let's say, a couple who are both writers, the success of one person tended to make the other person feel smaller. Even though you're happy for your partner, there's a part of you that says,

why can't I have the success that my partner has? And it's a very human thing of course. Yeah, of course. It's of course especially true if it's joined work, which the others. This is, there's really a dynamic. And I would say we were just about perfect for 10, 12 years, which is very long time. When we come back, what Danny and Amos discover together.

Stay with us. This is NPR. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. For the 100th episode of our podcast, I interview Daniel Kahneman. He is the author of the book, Thinking, Fast and Slow. In the 1960s, Danny spent a summer with a group of eminent psychoanalysts at a treatment center in Massachusetts. The center had a routine. A patient was examined for a month by multiple experts, and then everyone came together to do a case study. They reviewed notes, they interviewed the patient together. One particular case left a strong impression

on Danny. In the morning we learned that the young woman about whom we'd written the report had taken her life. And they did a very brave thing. They ran the case study, and I was deeply impressed, both by the honesty of what they did. But what they were trying to do, they were seeing signs that they had missed. And it was, you know, in retrospect, obviously, this was hindsight at work. I mean, now you know what's happened, so you're seeing signs and premonitions. And people are really feeling guilty. I saw her on the stairs and she looked strange and you know why didn't I stop to inquire. I mean you know

people look strange all the time. But you know when somebody so yeah that was that was an important episode. And of course what this episode reveals is how once an event happens, we trace back a story about how that event came to be. And of course, in journalism, we do this all the time. I remember after the 9-11 attacks, we spent years deconstructing all the errors that were made and drawing a pattern. When you see that pattern laid out, you have to say,

well, those people must have been really dumb because it's so obvious that there was a pattern that led to the 9-11 attacks. Yeah, this is hindsight, and it's one of the most important phenomena, truly in psychology and the psychology of judgment, because you understand the past, and the past surprises stop being surprising at the moment they happen, you know, then you have a story and you shouldn't have been surprised. And when you reconstruct it, you also reconstruct wrongly what you believed at the time. So you minimize, you reduce the surprise. So not only was it inevitable, but also I almost, I really sensed it. So, you know, now where this goes really wrong and is that the story is about the past or so good, that they create an illusion that life is understandable.

And that's an illusion. And that they create the illusion that you can predict the future, and that's an illusion. And it's maintained by hand side. So hand side is a central phenomenon really. And of course the errors we make eventually led to prospect theory, which was the work which you were cited for in the Nobel Prize among other things. If you were to explain prospect theory to an eighth grader, is there a way to do that? Well, it's very easy to explain.

It's much harder to make it interesting. And the theory that dominated thinking, when we wrote, and to a very large extent, still dominates economic thinking. It was formulated first in 1738, so it's been around a long time. And what it says is that when you're looking at a gamble, what you're evaluating, is you're evaluating two states of wealth. Your wealth, if you will win, and your wealth, if you will lose, and then if

you are offered a sure thing, instead of your wealth, if you get that true thing. And for 200 and you know, 60 years and so, people accepted that theory. Now, the theory really is, doesn't make sense, if you stop to think about it. People don't think of gains and losses as states of wealth. They just don't. They think of gains and losses as gains and losses. That was the fundamental insight of Prospect Theory. So, you know, you could ask that, you know, you get a Nobel Prize for that.

And you do in a certain context because if it surprises people. One of the things you say in the book is, are comforting conviction that the world makes sense, rests on a secure foundation, are almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance. And of course, you've made, spent a lifetime exploring the depths of your ignorance and all of our ignorance. But in many ways, there's something deeply human about this. To see the world as being chaotic and unpredictable and noisy is fundamentally unsettling. And it's easier to see the world as understandable and comprehensible and that fits in a story. Well, it's not, you know, we really have no option. I mean, the mind is created to make sense of

things. I mean, vision makes sense of things. We see objects. We see objects moving. And it's the same with judgment and thinking. We have to make sense of things. And we can't do otherwise. So it's not, you know, that we would be unsettled if we did otherwise. We can't. We make sense of things and we can't do otherwise. So it's not that we would be unsettled if we did otherwise. We can't. We make sense of things. That's the fun. We're since making organisms. And of course, it's worth pointing out that even though this leads to errors,

it's also the case that much of the time, this is enormously valuable, and our sense-making ability is actually works great, that it actually allows us to navigate the world successfully. Of course, I mean, you know, we're right, almost all the time. I mean, you know, we couldn't survive if we were and tried almost all the time. We make interesting mistakes,

and sometimes they're important mistakes, but mostly we're very well adapted to our environment. So when you think about news events, if I tell you, there are 19 hijackers who have flown planes into major buildings. And then we go back and we get biographical sketches of these people, and we understand their ideologies. And it activates things in our minds,

because of course, there are these agents that are doing these things to us. And we then spend hundreds of billions of dollars trying to combat terrorism. And you say, OK, that makes sense. This is a major threat. We've dealt with it. But let's say you have another threat over here,

where I tell you that in 80 years or 100 years, the temperature might rise five degrees. And as a result of this, the oceans might warm a little bit, and sea levels might rise by two or three inches. And as a result of this, the models predict that climate events will become more serious, at least according to the models, but you have to understand probability. And in order to try and head that off, you actually have to take very painful steps right now, maybe driving your car less, maybe living in a smaller house,

all kinds of things that are painful in the here and now for something that seems difficult, often the distance, and requires you to really understand statistics and probability. You've actually called climate change in some way sort of a perfect storm of the ways in which our minds are not equipped to deal with certain kinds of threats. I mean, it's really, if you were to design a problem that of the ways in which our minds are not equipped to deal with certain kinds of threats.

I mean, it's really, if you were to design a problem that the mind is not equipped to deal with, you know, climate change would fit the bill. It's distance, it's abstract, it's contested. And it doesn't take much. If it's contested, it's 50-50, you know, for many people immediately. You know, you don't ask, what do most scientists do, which side are the national academy of sciences? That's not the way it works. You know, some people say this, other people say that, and if I don't want to believe in it, I don't have to believe in it. So, it's, I'm

really, well, I'm pessimistic in general, but I'm, but I'm, I'm pessimistic in general, but I'm pessimistic in particular about the ability of democracies to deal with a threat like that effectively. If there were a comet hurtling down toward us, an event that would be predictable with the day, we'd mobilize. So it's not even that it's distant in time. If it was going to affect our children, we'd mobilize. But this is too abstract, possible, it's very different. We're not doing it in fact. So besides being pessimistic, does your research and understanding of this phenomenon give you any insight into how we should maybe talk about climate change and what we can do? Well, I think scientists, in a way, are deluded in that they have the idea that there is

one way of knowing things, and you know things when you have evidence for them. But that's simply not the case. People who have religious beliefs or strong political beliefs, they know things without having compelling evidence for them. And so there is a possibility of knowing things, which is clearly determined socially. I mean, we have our religion and our politics and so on because we love or used to love and trust the people who held those beliefs. There is no other way to explain why people hold to one religion and think other religions are funny, you know, which is really a very common observation. So the only way would be to create social pressure. So for me, it would be a milestone if you manage to take influential evangelists,

preachers, to adopt the idea of global warming and to preach it. That would change things. It's not going to happen by presenting more evidence that I think is clear. When we come back, we'll talk about happiness, memory, and noise. Stay with us. This is NPR. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantantham. Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for a series of ideas that helped develop the field of behavioral economics.

Danny, I don't know how you got an ethics panel to approve the study, but it's one of my favorite studies of all time. Tell me about the colonoscopy study and the Puykenhoulos. Well, the colonoscopy study was devised to test an idea that when people form a memory of an episode or an impression of an episode that had a certain duration, that actually they completely neglect the duration. And what they're sensitive to are illustrative, or crucial moments, and in particular, when it's a painful experience, it's the peak of the pain and it's the end of the pain. It's so much that pain you're at in the end. So that was a theory for which we had other evidence. And my friend, Donald Vredumair, who

is a physician in Toronto, he volunteered to create a study around that. So a study was run on people at the colonoscopy, which, at the time, was very painful. I mean, for those of you who have not reached the age of colonoscopy, which at the time was very painful. I mean, for those of you who have not reached the age of colonoscopy, it won't be painful when you have it. But at that time, it really was. So people had a colonoscopy.

And then half of them, it ended when it ended. But for half of them, they left the tube in for another minute or so. Now, this is not pleasant. Nobody would volunteer to have the tube in for another minute. But it improves the memory very significantly, because it's less painful than what went on before. It's not desirable, you wouldn't choose it, but it makes a difference between a really aversive memory, which you have when they pull the tube at a moment of high pain, the whole thing is very bad. But if you end on a gentler note, even if it's still painful, the memory improves.

Memory wasn't designed to measure ongoing happiness or to measure total suffering. For survival, you really don't need to put a lot of weight on duration, on the duration of experiences. It's how bad they are and whether they end well. I mean, that is really the information that you need for an organism. And so, they're very good evolutionary reasons for the peak and end rule and for the neglect of duration. It leads to, in some cases, to absurd results.

But... So, if you are a policy maker, I feel like this is a real ethical dilemma. So, if you are a policy maker, I feel like this is a real ethical dilemma. So let's say, for example, I'm running a hospital. I think the colonoscopy study or versions of it have later found that if you actually give people the painful experience

followed by the less painful experience, they are more likely to come back for the next colonoscopy because their memory of the colonoscopy was less painful. So you could argue from a public policy standpoint, where you want people to get tested, the right thing to do is to extend their pain in order that they will remember the pain as being less and come back more often. However, also from an ethical point of view,

you could argue that subjecting people to more pain than you need to subject them to is unethical. So what should we do? That's what it's easy. I mean, there are harder versions of it. But that one is easy because you would never frame it that way. You would just tell the people who are doing the procedure. Be very gentle at the end.

Be slow and gentle at the end. And that sounds like a good thing. And it's good for policy, and it will get more people. It will leave better memories, it will more compliance and so on. So there are ways, sometimes, of not presenting quite as sharply as you did. What would be a more difficult ethical dilemma

that I didn't think of that you could place to your, apply to yourself? Well, I think that if real suffering is involved, somebody in pain, and say, you can be in pain and barely conscious, or you can be in pain, and they will eliminate the memory at the end. So what is the, how much weight should you give to pain that the patient might be screaming but will not remember?

You know, that's an ethical dilemma. And of course, this does have all kinds of other implications. You've done some work looking at, you know, if you could go on a vacation, but you couldn't take photographs on the vacation, how would you think about a vacation? In other words, you're, you essentially have these two models of how the mind works. There's a mind that experiences life, and there's a mind that remembers life, and these two minds don't always agree with one another. Well, I mean, they have different interests, you know, why? So I spoke of the experiencing self, which is, you know, the one that lives moment to moment. And the remembering self is the one that keeps score. And the scores

that are generated, are generated by rules such as the peak end rule and so on. And so sometimes you can see that experiences are very different duration, and how do they matter? Oh, what is the value that you should attach to an experience that you will not remember, or that somebody will not remember? So my question on, in that context, was, I mean, consider your plans for your next occasion. And now imagine that at the end of the vacation, they will destroy all your pictures, and they'll give you an amnesic drug so that you won't remember a thing.

Now would you change your vacation plans if you knew that? And many people would, actually, because I think many people go on vacations to create memories for future consumption, which doesn't always happen. I mean, in my case, never happens. I never look in pictures, but that's a dilemma. So you conducted a study I remember a few years ago. I think it was published in the Journal of Science, where you evaluated how happy parents felt as they went through their days. And there's two ways you can, of course, ask the question. You can ask parents how happy are you with parenting?

And many parents will say it's the best thing they ever did. But then you can also ask parents on a moment-to-moment basis as they're parenting how they feel, and the answer turns out somewhat differently. Well, yeah, I mean, it turns out that parenting, if you really take the experiencing view of it, then it's like washing dishes, maybe a little worse, often, and then it has its moments. And it's the peak moments that people remember.

And when people remember the's moments, and it's the peak moments that people remember. And when people remember the peak moments, it makes the whole thing worthwhile, so it changes the meaning of the whole experience. So that was a much contestant finding, very unpopular finding, but very strong finding. If you look at experiences, people have more fun with their friends than with their spouses, you know, quite a bit. And if you were trying to make to increase the happiness of the experiencing

self, you would do very different things than people do because what people typically do, if they try to satisfy their remembering self. And maximizing the happiness of your experiencing self would make you more social, less ambitious. It would make you spend a lot more time with people that you love or like or enjoy because it's very largely social. So there are important implications of that distinction. Is there any insight that someone can draw from this work about whether they should become a parent, given this discrepancy between the remembering self and experiencing self? And I should remind you before you answer that your daughter is in the audience here with us. I have never met, almost never met, people who regretted having had their children.

So if you measure things by the remembering self and that's the only way, the point is that the experiencing self doesn't make decisions. All the decisions are made by the remembering self and the remembering self never regrets having had children. So from that point of view, the answer is clear. Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, laying the groundwork for what is today known as behavioral economics.

Danny explained many of these insights in his 2011 book, Thinking Fast and Slow. You're working on a new book where the couple of other people, but it's also a new area that you're looking at. A lot of the earlier work looked at the issue of biases and errors, and there's a new focus for a lot of the work that you're looking at, a lot of the earlier work looked at the issue of biases and errors, and there's a new focus for a lot of the work that you're doing right now, and it has to

do with the question of noise. What does that mean? Well, there are really two kinds of, to broad families of error. There is bias, and there is noise. And noise simply means randomness. It's variability that shouldn't be there. So if you imagine target shooting, then where the cluster of shots is,

there could be far from the target that's bias, but the variability of the cluster, that's noise. Many people, and certainly I in the past, are very interested in biases, and we think in terms of biases much more than we did like 60 years ago, where people would think of random error. And I now think that we have exaggerated biases, and that most areas are really noise, their randomness, and it's a very different approach to error than focusing on biases. I mean, I don't want to overstate it, biases are very important and so on, but noise has

been neglected, and I think it deserves attention. Do you think it has implications that are different from the implications related to bias when it comes to public policy, for example, is it easier to reduce the effects of noise to address them than bias? Well, certainly. I mean, you can, in the first place, if you take judgment away and have a computer

makes the decision, the computer will be noise-free. Algorithms are noise-free. In the sense that you present the same problem twice, you'll get the same answer. Whereas if you present the same problem to different judges or to the same judge at different times of day, you're going to get different answers. So you can eliminate noise by algorithm.

And I think we should do that wherever we can. And where we can't do that, we should, I think, the implication is that we should try to structure the judgment process, so as to make it more reliable. I'll give you an example where this really matters. There is a thing in the United States that people call the asylum lottery because people who ask for asylum get a judge, they get the judge at random. And in some cases they have an 80% chance of getting through and in other cases 15, that's noise.

And you really don't want it, I think. We're in the process right now at Hidden Brain of hiring someone. And in fact, we just conducted two interviews today and we have a couple tomorrow. And as I was doing the interviews, I was thinking about some of the work that you've done. In some ways, this is your earliest work,

going back many, many decades, looking at how you can reduce errors in the interview process. And I don't know whether you think of it as bias or you think about it as noise. But either way, it leads to flawed outcomes. And you came up with a technique that could address it. Yeah, I actually did come up with a technique a little more than 62 years ago, actually.

I was an officer in the Israeli Army. It was 1954. The Israeli Army was very young. It was 1956, actually. And I set up an interview system, which is a template for a lot of what is going on, and is a certainly a template for the way I think decisions should be made.

I haven't thought of that for many years. And the template is you have a problem. You need to evaluate people, break it up into dimensions. You know, what sounds elementary and I'm not going to say anything very surprising. Make judgments of each dimension independently of all the others. That independence is essential. Don't form a general impression until you have all the information. Delay intuition. Don't give it up necessarily.

Delay it. And the results are just better when you do things that way. And I think that's probably very general, as a way of thinking about judgment and decision making. It's a way of reducing noise, of increasing reliability. And it's not very costly, and I'd like to promote it. So of course, the idea, if I understand correctly, is you score people on different criteria,

give them a ranking so that you're evaluating it. But there's also an interesting piece of advice, which I understand they still offer in the Israeli Army when they're doing these evaluations. The final piece of advice after you understand they still offer in the Israeli army when they are doing these evaluations. The final piece of advice after you've done the calculations. What is that advice? Yeah, well that's, so I set up that interviewing system. I was 22 years old.

And the people, the interviewers who were 19 years old, they really didn't like that suggestion. What they really wanted was to have a heart-to-heart conversation and then to form a general impression of how good the combat soldier that individual would be. But they said, you are turning us into robots. And they had a point. And then I told them, OK, I'll compromise. You do it my way, the interview. You run the whole interview just

and you generate those scores independently, fact-based, and so on. Don't think of anything until the end. And in the end, close your eyes and give a score. How good a soldier will that person be? Now much to my surprise, that intuitive score is really very good. I mean, it says good as the average of the six trades.

And it's different, so it adds content. So having an intuition, if you delay it, it's quite good. The kicker of that story was that about 50 years later or so, I got a Nobel Prize for a short time, I was a celebrity in Israel. They took me to the army to my old base, and they explained how they were doing the interview because they were still using that system, essentially, with very little change.

And then the commander was telling me, and then she said, and then we tell them, close your eyes. So that thing had lasted for 50 years. That is that expression. So what I love about that, it's not so much intuition versus bias, but it's more maybe by just delaying intuition, the intuition gets better. And of course, if you don't do the detailed analysis, you still have an intuition that feels

very powerful and your ignorance is sort of papered over by this tendency of the mind. You know, intuition is compelling as such. I mean, you know, we have the intuition almost by definition. We trust it. And so delaying this and remaining very close to facts, as you collect your separate dimensions, is really very useful. And it permits an intuition that is well informed. Because normally we form intuitions very quickly. And then we spend the rest of the time

confirming that YAM, the situation was right. That, by the way, is a thought. It's been studied that way, in interviews, people form impressions in the first minute or two, and they spend the rest of the time testing that they're right, and, of course, confirming that they're right. So, this was clearly an example of how you came up with a mechanism in some ways to overcome how the mind works. But on many, many other fronts, it seems like the biases errors that you've discovered, even yourself, you say that you don't necessarily, you're not the master of those biases after

studying them for more than half a century. Yeah, I mean, even myself. I mean, I'm considered one of the worst offenders on many of these mistakes. So, you know, I'm overconfident when I really preach against that and I make extreme predictions and I preach against that. But, you know, some people read thinking fast and slow in the hope that reading it will improve their minds. I wrote it and it didn't improve my mind. It's not those things that are deep and powerful and they're hard to change.

Danny yesterday was your 84th birthday. Happy birthday. You've studied a great number of different things over the years and you tell me that one of the things that you're actually interested in studying is the subject of misery, much more than happiness, you're fascinated by misery. Now of course I can just put this down to the pessimism that clearly you've demonstrated for a long time. But you actually say you can draw more specific conclusions and there are takeaways from studying misery than from studying happiness.

Yeah, I'm actually, you know, I contributed to what is called happiness research. But I'm really disturbed by it. And I'm disturbed by positive psychology. In part, because I think that making people happier, it could be important how to do. It may not be society's business to make people happier. But reducing suffering, that's something else.

It's easy to agree that this is important. It's easy to agree that this is important. It's easy to agree that society should be involved. Furthermore, it's easier to measure a misery than to measure happiness. And what we can do about it is clear than what we can do to enhance happiness. So from all these points of view, I think that, and again, you know, it's a matter of a semantic luck. You know, we speak of length and not of shortness, and so we

speak of happiness and not the other side of unhappiness. But if you focus on unhappiness and misery, you end up doing very different things, thinking very different thoughts and taking different actions, which I think we should do. So you've been a wonderful sport, Danny, and I'm really grateful for you for coming down, and I'm almost a little shame faced about doing what I'm about to do right now, which is I'm wondering if we can increase your happiness just a tad, but it might increase your misery by singing Happy birthday to you. You are one of hidden brands heroes and we feel that it's really appropriate to end with that. So on the count of three, happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Thank you.

Danny Coniman, thank you for joining me today on Hidden Brains 100th episode. My pleasure. APPLAUSE This episode of Hidden Brain was produced by Raina Cohen, Karam Gurghaleson, and edited by Tara Boyle. Our team includes Jenny Schmidt, Renek Larr, Pat Shah, and Matthew Schwartz. Our engineers are Andy Huthur and Neil Tavolt. I'm Shankar Vedantum. See you next week. Thank you.