Making Sense with Sam Harris - #150 — The Map of Misunderstanding (From the Archive)

Episode Date: August 11, 2026

From the archive: In this 2019 episode, Sam Harris speaks with Daniel Kahneman at the Beacon Theatre in NYC. They discuss the replication crisis in science, System 1 and System 2, where intuitions reliably fail, expert intuitions, the power of framing, moral illusions, anticipated regret, the asymmetry between threats and opportunities, the utility of worrying, removing obstacles to wanted behaviors, the remembering self vs the experiencing self, improving the quality of gossip, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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please consider subscribing today. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. I'm Kirby Ferguson, producer here at the show. Sam is on vacation this week, so we are reaching into the archive and bringing back one of our favorite episodes. This is Sam's conversation with the Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Connman, who passed in 2024. It's a timeless conversation and actually one of our funnier episodes. If you've heard it before, it rewards a second listen. Sam will be back next week with the new episode.

For now, enjoy the map of misunderstanding. Okay. Well, today I'm bringing you the audio from my live event with Danny Conneman at the Beacon Theater in New York. This was a sold-out event. in a very cool old theater. I'd actually never been to the beacon before, but it has a storied history and music and comedy. Anyway, it was a great pleasure to share the stage with Danny. Daniel Conneman, as you may know, is an emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton University

and also an emeritus professor of public affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002 for the work he did on decision-making under uncertainty with Amos Tversky. Unfortunately, Tversky died in 1996, and he was a legendary figure, who would have certainly shared the Nobel Prize with Danny had he lived longer. They don't give the Nobel posthumously. In any case, I think it's uncontroversial to say that Danny has been the most influential

living psychologist for many years now, but he's perhaps best known in the general public for his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of the work he did with Tversky. Michael Lewis also recently wrote a biography of the Connman-Tversky Collaboration, and that is called the Undoing Project. Anyway, Danny and I covered a lot of ground at the beacon. We discuss the replication crisis in science, systems one and two, which is to say automatic and unconscious, cognitive processes, and more conscious and deliberative ones. We talk about the failure of intuition, even expert intuitions, the power of framing, moral illusions, anticipated

regret, the asymmetry between threats and opportunities, the utility of worrying, removing obstacles to wanted behaviors, the remembering self versus the experiencing self, improving the improving the quality of gossip and many other topics. Anyway, Danny has a fascinating mind, and I think you'll find this a very good introduction to his thinking. Of course, if you want more, his book, Thinking Fast and Slow, also awaits you if you haven't read it.

And now I bring you, Daniel Connaman. That's unusual. Well, well, thank you all for coming. Really an honor to be here. It's a, Danny, it's a special honor to be here with you, so thank you for coming. My pleasure. It is often said and rarely true that a guest needs no introduction,

but in your case, that is virtually true. We're going to talk about your work throughout, so people will, if for the one person who doesn't know who you are, you will understand at the end of the hour. But I guess by way of introduction, I just want to ask, but what is the worst thing about winning the Nobel Prize? That's a hard question. actually. It weren't many downsides to it. Okay, well, nobody wants to hear your problems, Dan.

So how would you, how do you think about your body of work? How do you summarize the intellectual problems you have tried to get your hands around? You know, it's been just a series of problems that occurred that I worked on. There was no big program. When you look back, of course, I mean, you see patterns and you see ideas that have been, with you for a long time, but there was really no plan. I was, you know, you follow, you follow things, you follow ideas, you follow things that you take fancy to. Really, that's a story of my intellectual life. It's just one thing after another. Judging from the outside, it seems to me, that you have told us much of what we now think we know about cognitive bias and cognitive illusion. And really,

The picture is of human ignorance having a kind of structure. It's not just that we get things wrong. We get things reliably wrong. And because of that, whole groups, markets, societies can get things wrong because the errors don't cancel themselves out. I mean, bias becomes systematic. And that obviously has implications that touch more or less everything we care about. Let's just, I want to track through your work, you know, as presented in your

you're now famous and well-read book, Thinking Fast and Slow. And I just want to try to tease out what should be significant for all of us at this moment, because human unreason, unfortunately, becomes more and more relevant, it seems, and we don't get over these problems. And I guess I want to just to begin to ask you about a problem that's very close to home now, this, what is called the replication crisis or reproducibility crisis in science, in particular social sciences, and in particular psychology. And for those in the room who are not aware of what has happened and how dire this seems, it seems that when you go back to even some of the most celebrated studies in psychology,

their reproducibility is on the order of 50, 60 percent in the best case. So there was one study done in that took 21 papers from nature and science, which are the most highly regarded journals, and reproduced only. 13 of them. And so let's talk about the problem we faced in even doing science in the first place. Well, I mean, you know, the key problem and the reason that this happens is that research is extensive. And it's extensive personally, and it's extensive in terms of money. And so you want it to succeed. So when you're a researcher, you know what you want to find. And that creates biases that you're not

fully aware of. And I think a lot of those are simply self-delusion. That is, you know, there is a concept that's known as P-hacking, which is people very honestly deluding themselves about what they find. And there are several tricks of the trade that, you know, people know about them. You are going to do an experiment. So instead of having one dependent variable where you predict the outcome, you take two dependent variables. And then if one of them doesn't work, you stay with the one that does work. You do that and things like that a few times, then it's almost guaranteed that your research will not be replicable. And that happens. It was first discovered in medicine. I mean, it's more important in medicine than it is in psychology, where somebody famously said that

most published research in medicine is false. And a fair amount of published psychological research is forced to. Yeah, but even some of the most celebrated results in psychology, like priming and the marshmallow test and... Well, yeah, I mean, it's not only, it's actually, they get celebrated in part because they're surprising. Yeah. And the rule is, you know, the more surprising the result is, the less likely it is to

be true. So that's how celebrated results get to be non-replicable. Right. And the scariest thing I heard, I don't know how robust this study was, but someone did a study on trying to replicate unpublished studies and found they replicated better than published studies. Did you hear this? I don't think that's replicable. Oh, yes. Okay. Yeah. I hope not. Let's talk about system one and two. These are the structures that give us so much of our,

what can be a disparating picture of human rationality. summarize for us? What are these two systems you talk about? I mean, before starting with anything else, there are clearly two ways that ideas come to mind. I mean, so if I say two plus two, then an idea comes to your mind. You haven't asked for it. It's, you're completely passive, basically. Something happens in your memory. If I ask you to multiply, you know, 24 by 17 or something like that, you have to work to get that idea. So it's that dichotum, between the associative effortless and the effortful. And that is phenomenologically obvious.

You start from there. And how you describe it and whether you choose to describe it in terms of systems, as I did or in other terms, that's already a theoretical choice. And in my view, theory is less important than the basic observation of, you know, that there are two ways for ideas to come to mind.

and then you have to describe it in a way that could be useful. And what I mean by that is you have to describe the phenomena in a way that that will help researchers have good ideas about facts and about experiments to run. And the system one and system two was, it's not my dichotomy and even not my terminology. And in fact, it's a terminology that many people object to. But I chose it quite deliberately. What are the liabilities? Because people, in your book, you try to guard against various misunderstandings of this.

Well, yes. I mean, you know, there is a rule that you're taught fairly early in psychology, which is never to invoke what is called homunculi, which are little people in your head whose behavior explain your behavior or explain the behavior of people. That's a no-no. And System 1 and System 2 are really homunculey. So I knew what I was doing when I picked those.

But the reason I did were that System 1 and System 2 are agents. They have personalities. And it turns out that the mind is very good at forming pictures and images of agents that have intentions and propensities and traits and they're active. And it's just easy to get your mind around that. And that's why I picked that terminology, which many people find sort of objectionable because they are really not agents in the head. It's just a very useful way to think about it, I think. So there's no analogy to be drawn between a classical, psychological, even Freudian picture of the

conscious and the unconscious. How do you think about consciousness and everything that precedes it in life? I mean, you know, it's clearly related in the sense that what I call System 1 activities, the automatic ones, one characteristic they have, that you're completely unconscious of the process that produces them. You just get, you know, you get the results. You get four when you hear two plus two. In System 2 activities, you're often conscious of the process.

You know what you're doing when you're calculating. You know what you're doing when you're searching for something in memory. So clearly, consciousness and system 2 tend to, to go together. It's not a perfect, you know, and who knows what consciousness is anyway, but they tend to go together, and system one is much more likely to be unconscious and automatic. Neither system is a perfect guide toward tracking reality, but system one is very effective in many cases. Otherwise, it wouldn't have evolved the way it has. But I guess maybe let's start with the picture of where our intuitions are reliant.

and where they reliably fail. How do you think about the utility of intuition? I'll say first about System 1 that our representation of the world, most of what we know about the world, is in System 1, we're not aware of it, so that we're going along in life with producing expectations

or being surprised or not being surprised by what happens. All of this is automatic. We're not aware of it. So most of our thinking, system 1 thinking, Most of what goes on in our mind goes on and we're not aware of it. So that's an intuition is defined as, you know, knowing or rather thinking that you know something

without knowing why you know it or without knowing where it comes from. And it's fairly clear, actually. I mean, that's a digression, but there is a guy named Gary Klein or psychologist who really doesn't like anything that I do. And he, he. How does your system, one, feel about that? I like Gary a lot, actually.

But he believes in intuition and an expert intuition, and he's a great believer in, and his beautiful data showing beautiful observations of expert intuition. So he and I, I invited him, actually, to try and figure out our differences, because obviously I'm a skeptic. So we're intuition marvelous, and where is it flawed? And we worked for six years before we came up with something and we published an article called The Failure to Disagree because in fact, there is a fairly clear boundary

about when you can trust your intuitions and when you can't. And I think that's summarized in three conditions. The first one is the world has to be regular enough. I mean, first of all, intuition is recognition. And that's Herbert Simon said that. You have an intuition, it's just like recognizing, you know, that it's like a child's recognizing what a dog is. It's immediate. Now, in order to recognize patterns and reality, which is what true intuitions are, the world has to be regular enough so that there are

so that there are regularities to be picked up. Then you have to have enough exposure to those regularities to have a chance to learn them. And third, it turns out that intuition depends critically on the time between when you're making a guess and a judgment and when you get feedback about it. The feedback has to be rapid. And if those three conditions are satisfied, then eventually people develop intuition so that chess players, chess is a prime example, we're all three conditions are satisfied. So after, you know, many hours, I don't know 10,000 or not, but many hours, a chess player will have intuitions. All the ideas, all the moves that come to his or her mind are going to be strong moves. That's intuition.

Right. So the picture is one of intuition. I mean, there are intuitions that are more innate than others. We're so primed to learn certain things innately that no one remembers learning these things, you know, recognizing a human. face, say. But much of what you're calling intuition was at one point learned. So intuition is trainable. There are experts in various domains, chess being a very clear one, that develop what we consider to be expert intuitions. And yet much of the story of the blind spots in our rationality is a story of the failure of expert intuition. So to what where do you see the frontier of trainability

I mean, I think that what happens is that when those conditions are not satisfied, people have intuitions too. That is, you know, they have ideas that come to their mind with high confidence and they think they're right. And so the main thing. I've met these people. Yeah. I mean, you know, we've all met them and we see them in the mirror and, you know, that's, so the, it turns out you can have intuitions for bad reasons. You know, so it's, you know, so it's, it. All it takes is a thought that comes to your mind automatically and with high confidence, and you'll think that it's an intuition, and you'll trust it. But the correlation between confidence and accuracy is not high. That's one of the saddest things about the human condition. You can be very confident in ideas and the correlation. You shouldn't trust your confidence. Well, so that's just, yes, a depressing but fascinating fact.

that the signature of a high probability that you are correct is what you feel while uttering that sentence. I mean, psychologically, confidence is the marker of your credence in whatever proposition it is you're entertaining. And yet, we know they can become totally uncoupled and often are uncoupled. Even what you know or think you know scientifically, how much of that leads back into your life and changes your epistemic attitude. You know, I mean, yeah, do you hedge your bet?

How, how is Danny Kahneman different, given what he has understood about science? Not at all. Not at all. I mean, well, I mean, it's even more depressing than I thought. You know, in terms of, you know, my intuition is better than being better than they were, no. And furthermore, I have to confess, I'm also very overconfident. So even that, I haven't. learn. So it's hard to get rid of those things. You're just issuing a long string of apologies. I mean, how do you get through life? Because you should know better. If anyone should know better, you should know better. Yeah, but I don't really feel guilty about it. So I'm sorry.

So how hopeful are you that we can improve? How hopeful are you that an individual can improve and how hopeful are you that we can design systems of conversation and incentives that can make some future generation find us more or less unrecognizable in our stupidity and self-decent? I should preface by saying that I'm not an optimist in general, but I'm certainly not an optimist about those questions. I don't think that, you know, I'm a case study because I've been studying that stuff for more than 50 years, and I don't think that my intuitions have really significantly improved. I can catch sometimes, and that's important, I can catch, recognize a situation as one in which I'm likely to be making a mistake. And this is the way that people protect themselves against visual illusions. You can see the illusions, and there's no way you

cannot see it, but you can recognize that this is likely to be an illusion, so don't trust my eyes, take out the ruler. There is an equivalent. You know, there is a A similar thing goes on with cognitive illusions. Sometimes you know that your intuitions, your confident thought, is unlikely to be true. That's quite rare. It doesn't happen a lot. I don't think that I've become, you know, in any significant way, smarter because of studying errors of cognition.

Right. Okay. Let me just absorb that for a second. What you must thirst for on some levels that this. understanding of ourselves can be made useful or more useful than it is because the consequences are absolutely dire, right? I mean, our decision making is, one could argue, the most important thing on Earth, certainly with respect to human well-being, right? I mean, how we negotiate nuclear test ban treaties, right? I mean, like everything from that on down, this is all

human conversation, human intuition, errors of justice. judgment, pretensions of knowledge, and sometimes we get it right. And the delta there is extraordinarily consequential. So if I told you that we, over the course of the next 30 years, made astonishing progress on this front, right, so that we, our generation looks like, you know, bumbling medieval characters compared to what our children or grandchildren begin to see as a new norm, how did we get there? You don't get there. You know, it's the same as if you told me,

we don't have a perceptual system be very different in 60 years, and I don't think so. Let's take one of these biases or sources of bias that you have found. I mean, the power of framing, right? We know that if you frame a problem in terms of loss or you frame the same problem in terms of gains, you get a very different set of preferences from people because people are so verse to loss. So the knowledge of that fact, let's say you're a surgeon, right, and you're recommending or at least proffering a surgery for a condition to your patients who you have a, you know, you have taken a hypocrite oath to do no harm. And you know, because you read Danny Connman's

book, that if you put the possibility of outcome in terms of mortality rates versus survival rates, you are going to be moving several dials in your patient's head. One way or or the other reliably. Can you conceive of us ever agreeing that there's a right answer there, like in terms of what is the ethical duty to frame this correctly? Is there a correct framing, or are we just going to keep rolling the dice? Well, I mean, this is a lot of questions at once. In the first place, you know, when you're talking about framing, the person who is subject to the framing, so you have a surgeon framing something for a patient. First of all, the patient is going to be completely unaware of the fact that there is an alternative frame.

That's why it works. It works because you see one thing and you accept the formulation as it is given. So that's why framing works. Now, whether there is a true or not true answer, so I should let me mention the sort of the canonical problem, which actually my late colleague, Emiserski, invented. in one formulation, you have a choice between, well, there is a disease that's going to cause 600 deaths unless something is done, and you have your choice between saving 400 people or a two-third probability of saving 600. Or, alternatively, other people get the other framing, that you have a

choice between killing 200 people. Killing 200 people for sure, and not allowing. them to die, and a one-third probability that 600 people will die. Is there a correct answer? If they're a correct frame? Now, the interesting thing is, people, depending on which frame you presented to them, they make very different choices. But now you confront them with the fact that here you've been inconsistent. And some people will deny it, but you can convince them.

This is really the same problem. You know, if you save 400, then 200 will die. And then what happens is they're dumbfounded. And is there are no intuitions. We have clear intuitions about what to do with gains. We have clear intuitions about what to do with losses. And when you strip it from that language with which we have intuition, we have no idea what to do.

So, you know, what is better when you stop to think about, You know, stop thinking about saving or about dying. Well, actually, I've forgotten, if that research was ever done, I forgot what the results were. Has the third condition been compared to the first two? What do people do when you give them both framings and dumbfound them? I mean, where do the percentages go with respect to? This is not something that, you know, we've done formally, but I can tell you that I'm dumbfounded. That is, I have absolutely no idea, you know, I have the same intuitions as every.

everybody else, you know, when it's in the gains, they want to save lives, and when it's in the losses, I don't want people to die. But that's where the intuitions are. When you're talking to me about 600 more people staying alive with a probability two-thirds, or, you know, when you're talking about numbers of people living, I have absolutely no intuitions about that. So that is quite common in an ethical problem and in moral problems, that they're framed-dependent. And when you strip the frames away, people are left without a moral in Jewish. And this is incredibly consequential when you're thinking about human suffering. So your colleague, Paul Slovak, has done these brilliant experiments where he's shown that if you ask people to support a charity, you talk about a famine in Africa, say, and you show them one little girl attached to a very salient and heartbreaking narrative about how much she's suffering.

you get the maximum charitable response. But then you go to another group and you show that same one little girl and tell her story, but you give her a brother and the response diminishes. And if you go to another group and you give them the little girl and her brother, and then you say, in addition to the suffering of these two gorgeous kids, there are 500,000 suffering children behind them suffering the same famine. Then the altruistic response goes to the floor. It's precisely the opposite of what we understand system two should be normative, right?

The bigger the problem, the more concerned and charitable we should be. So to take that case, there's a way to correct for this at the level of tax codes and levels of foreign aid and which problems to target. We know that we are emotionally gamed by the salient personal story and more or less morally blind to statistics and raw numbers. I mean, there's another piece of work that you did, which shows that people are so enumerate with respect to the magnitude of problems

that they will more or less pay the same amount, whether they're saving 2,000 lives, 20,000 lives or 200,000 lives. Yeah. Because basically, and that's a system one characteristic. Basically, you're saving one life. You're thinking, you have an image, you have stories, and this is what System 1 works on, And this is where emotions are about.

They're about stories. They're not about numbers. So it's always about stories. And what happens when you have 500,000, you have lost a story. A story, to be vivid, has to be about an individual case. And when you dilute it by adding cases, you dilute the emotion. Now, what you're describing in terms of the moral response to this is no longer an emotional response. And this is already, you know, this is cognitive morality. This is not emotional morality.

You have disconnected from the emotion. You know that it's better to save 500,000 than 5,000, even if you don't feel better about saving 500,000. So this is passing on to system two. This is passing on to the cognitive system, the responsibility for action. And you don't think that handoff can be made in a durable way? I think it has to be made by policymakers. And policymakers, you know, we hire some people to think about numbers and to think about it in those ways. But if you want to convince people that this needs to be done, you need to convince them by telling them stories about individuals because numbers just don't catch the imagination of people. What does the phrase cognitive ease mean in your work? Well, it means that some ideas come

very easily to mind and others come with greater and greater difficulty to the point of. So that's what cognitive, it's also called fluency. It's, you know, what's easy to think about. And there is a correlation between fluency and pleasantness, apparently, that pleasant things are more fluent. They come more easily, not always more easily, but yes, they're more fluent. And fluency is pleasant. So there is that interaction between fluency and pleasure, which I hope replicates. So the picture I get is of, I don't know if you referenced this in your book, I can't remember, but what happens, what we know. from split brain studies that for the most part the left linguistic hemisphere confabulates.

It's continually manufacturing discursive stories that ring true to it. And there's, in the case of actual neurological confabulation, there's no reality testing going on. It's just, it's telling a story that is being believed. But it seems to me that most of us are in a similar mode most of the time, there's a very lazy reality testing mechanism coming online, and it's just easy to take your own word for it most of the time. I think this is really, as you say, this is the normal state. The normal state is that we're telling ourselves stories. We're telling ourselves stories to explain why we believe in things. More often than not, retrospectively, in a way that bears no relationship to the system one bottom-up reasons why we're feeling.

Absolutely. I mean, but, you know, for me, the example that was formative in is what happened with post- hypnotic suggestions. So you put somebody under hypnosis and you tell them, you know, when I clap my hands, you will feel very warm and you'll open a window. And you clap your hands and they get up and open a window. And they know why they open the window. And they know why they open the window. It has nothing to do with the suggestion. It comes with a story. They felt really warm and uncomfortable, and they needed air, and they opened the window.

Actually, in this case, you know, the cause. The cause was the hand was clamped. Is that going to replicate? That one replicates. I'm pretty sure. You know, I hope so. Yeah, I'm sure. Do you have a favorite cognitive error or bias?

Yeah. Which of your ugly children do you like the most? Yeah, I think, I mean, it's not the simplest to explain, but my favorite one is sort of extreme predictions. When you have very weak evidence, and on the basis of very weak evidence, you draw extreme conclusions. I call it, technically, it's called non-regressive prediction,

and it's my favorite. Right, right. Where do you see it appear? Is there an example of it that you? Oh, I mean. you see it all over the place that when, you know, one very obvious situation is in job interviews. So, you know, you interview someone and you have a very clear idea of how they will perform. And even when you're told that your ideas are worthless, because in fact you cannot predict performance or can predict it only very poorly, it doesn't affect it.

Next time you interview the person, you have the same confidence, interview somebody else. I mean, that's something that I discovered very early in my career. I was an officer in the Israeli army as a draftee. And I was interviewing candidates for officer training. And I discovered that I had that uncanny power to know who will be a good officer and who won't be. And I really could tell, you know, interviewing people. I knew their character. You get that sense of, you know, confident knowledge.

And then the statistics showed that actually we couldn't predict anything. And yet the confidence remained. It's a very strange. Well, so there must be a solution for that. Some people following your work must recommend that you either don't do interviews or heavily discount them. Yeah, that's absolutely true. Don't do interviews mostly. And don't do interviews in particular because

if you run an interview, you will trust it too much. So there have been many cases, studies, I don't know about many, but there have been studies, in which you have candidates, you have a lot of information about them. And then if you add an interview, it makes your predictions worse, especially if the interviewer is the one who makes a final decision. because when you interview, this is so much more vivid than all the other information you have that you put way too much weight on it. Is that also a story about just the power of face-to-face interaction? It's face-to-face interaction, it's immediate, you know, anything that you experience

is very different from being told about it. And, you know, as scientists, one of the remarkable things that I know is how much more I trust my results than anybody else's. And that's true of everybody I know. You know, we trust our own results. Why? No reason. All right. Then let's talk about regret. Okay. What is the power of regret in our lives? How do you think about regret? Well, I think regret is an interesting emotion, and it's a special case of an emotion that has to do with counterfactual thinking. That is, regret is not about something that happened. It's about something that could have happened but didn't. And I don't know about regret itself,

but anticipated regret, the anticipation of regret plays an important role in lots of decisions. That is, there's a decision and you tell yourself, well, if I don't do this and it happens, then how will I feel? That expectation of regret is very powerful. and it's well-known in financial decisions and a lot of other decisions. It's connected to loss aversion as well, right? Well, I think you will regret it more. It's a form of loss, and it's quite vivid

that you're able to anticipate how you will feel if something happens, and that becomes very salient. Well, does the asymmetry with respect to how we view losses and gains make sense ultimately? I think at some point in your work, you talk about an evolutionary rationale for it because suffering is worse than pleasure is good, essentially, because there's a survival advantage

for those who are making greater efforts to avoid suffering. But it also just seems like there's, if you put in the balance of possibility the worst possible misery and the greatest possible pleasure, I mean, if I told you, we could have the night we're going to have tonight and it will be a normal night of conversation or there's a part of the evening where I can give you the worst possible misery for a half hour followed by the best possible pleasure let's have a conversation let's just yeah let's just get a cheese burner and a diet coke the prospect of suffering in this universe seems to overwhelm the prospect of of happiness or well-being I know you put a lot of thought into the power of sequencing.

I can imagine that feeling the misery first and the pleasure second would be better than the reverse. Much. But it's not going to be enough to make it seem like a good choice, I would imagine. How do you think of this asymmetry between the basic asymmetry is between threats and opportunities. And threats are more immediate. So in many situations, it's not true everywhere. there are situations where opportunities are very rare, but threats are immediate and they have to be dealt with immediately. So the priority of threats over opportunities must be built in by a large

evolutionarily. Do you think we could extract an ethical norm from this asymmetry? For instance, could it be true to say that it is more important to alleviate suffering than to provide pleasure? if we had some way to calibrate the magnitude of each? Well, and the first, we did a study, Dick Thaler and Jack Natch and I did a study a long time ago, but intuitions about fairness. And it's absolutely clear that that asymmetry rules intuitions about fairness. That is, there is a very powerful rule of fairness that people identify with, not to cause lawsuits.

that is you have to have a very good reason to inflict a loss in someone. The injunction to share your gains is much weaker. So that is symmetry, what we call the rights that people have, quite frequently the negative rights that people have, is the right not to have losses inflicted on you. So there are powerful moral intuitions that go in that direction. And the second question that you asked, because that was a compound question about well-being, yeah, I mean, I think, you know, in recent decades there's a tremendous emphasis on happiness and the search for happiness and the responsibility of governments to make citizens happy and so on.

And one of my doubts about this line of work and this line of thinking is that I think that preventing misery is a much better and more important objected than promoting happiness. And so the happiness movement I have my doubts about on those grounds. Given what you said, it's hard to ever be sure that you've found solid ground here. So there's the intuition that you just cited that people have a very strong reaction to impose losses that they don't have to unshared gains, right? You do something that robs me of something I thought I had. I'm going to feel much worse about that than just the knowledge that you didn't share some abundance that I never had in the first place.

But it seems that we could just be a conversation away from standing somewhere that makes that asymmetry look ridiculous, analogous to the Asian disease problem. It's a framing effect that we may have an evolutionary story to tell about why we're here. but given some opportunity to be happy in this world, it could seem counterproductive. I say this already being anchored to your intuition. I share this situation. Yeah, I think that, you know, in philosophical debates about morality and well-being, there are really two ways of thinking about it. And there is one way about when you're thinking of final states and what everybody will have.

And there there is a powerful intuition that you want people more or less to be equal, or at least not to be too different. But there is another way of thinking about it, which is, given a situation under the state of society, how much redistribution do you want to impose? And there there is an asymmetry because you are taking from some people and giving it to others, and you don't get to the same point. So we have powerful moral intuitions of two kinds. and they're not internally consistent.

And loss ofversion has a great deal to do with that. So given that there are many things we want and don't want, and we want and don't want them strongly, and we are all moving individually and collectively into a uncertain future where there are threats and opportunities, and we're trying to find our way. How do you think about worrying? What is the advantage of worrying?

If there was a way to just not worry, is that an optimal strategy? I think that Dalai Lama most recently articulated this in a meme, but this no doubt predates him. Take the thing you're worried about, right? Either there's something you can do about it or not. If there's something you can do about it, well, then do that thing. If you can't do anything about it, well, then why worry? Because you're just going to suffer twice, right? How do you think about worry, given your work here?

Well, I don't think my work leads to any particular. conclusions about this. I mean, the Dalai Lama is obviously right. I mean, you know, why worry? But some people are going to tweet that and it's not going to work out well for you. On the other hand, on the other hand, I would like to see people worry a fair amount about the future. And even because you don't know right now whether or not you'll be able to do anything about it. Right. I mean, maybe worry. The only way to get enough activation energy into the system to actually motivated to do something. Yes, to worry.

You know, one of the problems, for example, when you're thinking of climate change, one of the problems, you can't make people worry about something that is so abstract and distant. And, you know, if you make people worry enough, things would change. But there is,

scientists are incapable of making the public worry sufficiently about that problem. To steal a technique that you just recommended, if you could make a person, story out of it that would sell the problem much more effectively. It's just climate change is a very difficult thing to personalize. It's very difficult to personalize and it's not immediate. So it really climate change is the worst problem in a way, the problem that we're least well equipped to deal with because it's remote, it's abstract, and it's not a clear and present danger. I mean,

a meteorite, you know, coming to Earth, that would mobilize people. Climate change is a much more difficult problem to deal with and worry is thought of that story. It's interesting that a meteorite would be different. I mean, even if you put it far enough out there, so you have an Earth crossing asteroid in 75 years, there would still be some counsel of uncertainty. People would say, well, we can't be 100% sure that something isn't going to. to happen in the next 75 years that will divert this asteroid. Other people will say, well,

surely we're going to come up with some technology that would be onerously costly for us to invent now, but 20 years from now could be trivially easy for us to invent. So why steal anything from anyone's pocketbook now to deal with it? You could run some of the same arguments, but there's something, the problem is crystallized in a way. The difference is there is a story about the asteroid. You have a clear image of what happens if it hits. And the image is a lot clearer than climate change. So one generic issue here is the power of framing. I mean, we are now increasingly becoming students of the power of framing, but we are not,

we should just be able to come up with a list of the problems. We have every reason to believe are real and significant. and sort those problems by the variable of, this is the set of problems that we are, we know that we are very unlikely to feel an emotional response to. We are just, we are not wired to appreciate, to be motivated by what we rationally understand in these areas. And then take the cognitive step of deliberately focusing on those problems.

If we did that, if everyone in this room did, that what we're then left with is a political problem of selling this attitude toward the rest of... I mean, you know, you use the tricky word there, and the word is we. Who is we? I mean, you know, in that story, who is we? So you're talking about a group of people, possibly political leaders who are making a decision on behalf of the population that in a sense they treat like children who do not understand the problem. I mean, it's quite difficult. Surely you can't be talking about our current political leaders.

No, I'm not. But it's actually, I find it difficult to see how democracies can effectively deal with a problem like climate change. I mean, you know, if I had to guess, I would say China is more likely to come up with effective solutions than the West. Members can hear the full conversation by subscribing at samharis.org. subscribers get a private RSS feed you can use with your favorite podcast player.