Best of Series: A Remarkable Life, Fast and Slow With Daniel Kahneman

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hello, and welcome to the Psychology Podcast. Today's episode is
part of the best of series, where we highlight some
of the most exciting and enthralling and enlightening episodes from
the archives of the Psychology Podcast. Enjoy today. It's great
to chat with Daniel Kahneman. One of the most influential
psychologists of all time. Cooman is known for his work

(00:22):
on the psychology of judgment and decision making, as well
as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the two
thousand and two Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He's
author of the best selling book Thinking Fast and Slow
and co author of the recent book Noise Off, Wall
and Judgment. In twenty thirteen, Codoman received the Presidential Medal
Freedom from Barack Obama. Daniel is so great to chat

(00:44):
with you today.

Speaker 2 (00:45):
It's a pleasure to be here.

Speaker 1 (00:48):
I'm so excited to chat with you. You are such
a legend in the field, as you know, and there's
so much we could talk about, and I know we're
going to get into all the nerdy stuff, but I
actually want to start with more of the humanity of you,
because I think your personal story and sort of where
you're born and what you live through is utterly fascinating

(01:08):
and and just like a one of a kind kind
of experience. So you were born in Tel Aviv, but
you spend most of your childhood in Paris when it
was occupied by Nazi Germany in nineteen forty that's is
that right?

Speaker 2 (01:23):
That's correct.

Speaker 3 (01:24):
Yeah, so you.

Speaker 1 (01:26):
Went for this time where you know, even your father
was picked up in the first major round of French Jews,
but he was released six weeks later due to the
intervention of his employer. Do you recall could you do
have that memory in your head of like visiting that
that concentration camp or visiting where he was imprisoned.

Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah, I have a very vivid memory, so you know
it it was like a fortress, and of course we
couldn't come close to it. There was there was a wall,
and there were policemen, and there were lots of people
hanging on you know, all the windows, and lots of

(02:09):
women and children. It was still you know, the extermination
hadn't started yet, so we were still there. And one
thing I do remember is a policeman telling us they're
hungry in there, they're eating peels, and that that is

(02:29):
an image I've kept. I've also kept the image of
my father when he was released. By the way, the
story of his release is an interesting one because his
employer was a fascist. In fact, he was one of
the most important collaborators with the Nazis in France. But

(02:50):
he really loved my father and he had enough cloud
with the Germans to get my father released, as it were,
as if he were essential to the to the war efforts.
To the German war effort because my father was a
specialist in paint was amazing.

Speaker 1 (03:08):
And when he came back, he was skinned, you know,
basically skin and bones, but he came back in a suit.
Is that right?

Speaker 3 (03:14):
With dignity?

Speaker 2 (03:15):
Yeah, I mean that's that is another image that I have.
He weighed, I mean he was a short man. He
had a childhood disease, so he was less than five
foot six, I think five foot five, and but he
weighed forty five kilo, which forty five kilos would be

(03:39):
about one hundred pounds actually exactly one hundred pounds, and
there was very little of him. But my mother and
I had gone out to be and we planned to
be there to greet him, but he had come before
us and had taken a bath and had put on
a suit and was waiting for us before eating, although

(04:01):
he must have been very, very hungry. And that image
he is the one who opened the door. That's an
image of him that have kept. Yes.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
And there's another story that I heard that just touched
me so much where you know, there was this curfew
I guess after six pm, Jews couldn't leave the house.
And you were staying late at a friend's house and
you were coming home after then you turned your shirt
inside out so that the Jewish star wouldn't be visible
so you wouldn't get in trouble, and a guard saw you.

(04:34):
And what happened next.

Speaker 2 (04:35):
Well, he was ans soldier. He was wearing a black uniform.
And I was seven at the time, but I knew
that they were the worst of the worst. And we
were walking about to meet I actually went a few

(04:57):
years back. I went, and I checked my memory of
what the street looked like, and I found the exact
spot where where this had happened. But and you know,
we walked forward each other and he beckoned me and
and he picked me up and he hugged me, and

(05:18):
I was really frightened that he would see into my
sweater and see that I was wearing a star of
David then, but he didn't he put me down. He
opened his wallet. He showed me a picture of a
little boy, and he gave me some money, and then
he went his way. I went mine, and and yeah,

(05:38):
that's uh, that's a story, I remember quick, vividly.

Speaker 1 (05:45):
And your mom had told you that that humans are
endlessly complicated and fascinating, and that certainly dovetails with your
mom's wisdom there.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
Yeah, I mean that that I really remember, because it
is true that my mom was a gossip, but she
was an interesting gossip and and nothing was black and white,
and gossip wasn't about stories, it was about his character,
and it was always complicated. And I remember thinking that

(06:18):
this is really complicated in hearing this many which just
soon killed me. But he has a little boy just
like me, and he has emotions just like my father, and.

Speaker 1 (06:31):
So yeah, this is the you know, the start of
seeing the complexity of human psychology there in such a
remarkable way. So when France was liberated, so he moved around,
you know, when your father came back kind of kind
of on the.

Speaker 2 (06:45):
Round to escape, so we escaped. You know that France
was divided at the time between occupied France, which was
literally occupied by the Germans, and sort of the the
other part of France, which was sort of governed by
French fascists who collaborated with the Germans, but they were

(07:06):
less bad to the Jews, of course, and so we
escaped there in nineteen forty two when I was eight,
and that's where we spent the rest of them and
then the Germans walled into that area when the Allies
were threatening invasion, and then the situation became very very

(07:32):
well impossible for the Jews, and so we moved, we
moved around. We ended the war in a chicken group
for me, a converted chicken next to a cafe in
a small village in the well of France and nearly Moorish.
And that's where my father died, and that's where we were.

(07:58):
He died six weeks before full d Day, before the
Allies Invada Europe, and and that's where we were when
the war ended.

Speaker 1 (08:09):
Amazing, you know, it's just amazing. It's what is amazing
as well, is that that young children go through these
things and without just thinking it's not I mean, you
know it at some level, it's not normal. But it
can kind of you know, you don't know any other
kind of life, right, you know. I remember my grandma
telling me because she escaped the Pagrams in Russia, and

(08:31):
I remember her telling me how she hid in a
wagon and went from and it was just like, oh,
this is what normal children do. They escape, They escape
guards in a wagon. You know, what was it? You know,
just thinking back your memory of of what you were
thinking during that time, do you remember thinking yourself, you know,
like like this this is wrong, like or did you
think yourself, Oh, this is just normal.

Speaker 2 (08:53):
No, I mean I knew it wasn't. Yeah, I mean
when one of the thoughts that I remember having, it
was and the sister was nine years older than I was,
so I was nine, she was eighteen, and she could

(09:16):
have joined the resistance, the French resistance. But it turned
out later that I was the only member of the
family to whom this thought occurred, because our mentality were
the mentality of hunted rabbits, and hunted rabbits just don't
fight back, I mean, they just try to survive another day.
And that was very an important part actually of my identity,

(09:44):
and that made living in Israel, moving to Israel very
a major experience in my life because Israel was a
symbol of not being Rabbits anymore. I mean, this is
a place where you can defend yourself, it can be strong.
And during the war, the main thing that you know,

(10:06):
I was it was weakness and strength and the idea
that you know, Rabbits are weak. And I even thought
that my father was weak, was weak for dying when
we needed him. And uh so, yeah, that was I

(10:26):
lived through that. But I should add I don't think
that this shaped me in any profound way. I don't,
you know, I don't know what I would have been
with different experiences, But I really do not race anything
that happened to me to those years.

Speaker 1 (10:42):
Mhm. Fascinating. I guess we don't. We won't. We can't
do the experiment. But it must have. Yeah, it very
lea shaped your interest in human psychology.

Speaker 2 (10:56):
Yeah, it probably did. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (10:59):
So Francis liberated and in nineteen forty six the family
moved to Palestine. This this is this is pre Israel.
This is this is this is at the birth. We're
literally at the birth of a nation. Right, you know
what was it? It wasn't called Palestine. It was called
the British Mandatory Palestine, right or something like that. Yeah, yeah,

(11:22):
what my own question there is what was that like?
I mean, there's not many people I can ask what
was it like to live at the birth of Israel?

Speaker 2 (11:31):
That's right, not all that many. Well, I remember we
moved there in nineteen forty six, and in nineteen forty
seven there was a UN declaration that allowed the state,
Jurish state to exist, and I remember dancing in the streets.
I was thirteen then, and and the war began. As

(11:54):
soon as the British retreated, the Israel was attacked by
the Arab countries around it, and and yeah, there was
a war and it lasted off and on for more
than a year. The casualty level was huge, by you know,

(12:18):
the standards of today. There were one percent of the
population of the population at the beginning died in the war.
But by the end of the war in nineteen forty nine,
it was you know, it was a new country and
it was still very new when I went into the

(12:40):
Armia where well, I don't know, if you want anything,
to go.

Speaker 3 (12:47):
Into battle, yeah, going to it, going to it.

Speaker 2 (12:50):
Well, so everything was really new, and you know, everything
had to be improvised, from uniforms to to rule regulations,
what have you. I went I was seventeen when I
graduated from high school, and there was a special unit
of the Israeli Army that was called the Academic Reserve,

(13:16):
where it was the equivalent of our OTC, but where
you well, went through officer training during the summers, but
went to university and I studied psychology and mathematics, and
in nineteen fifty four I went into the army. So
that's a very long time ago. And I was a

(13:37):
platoon commander for a year, and then I became a
psychologist because you know, I had a BA in psychologist,
and as with a BA in psychology, I were the
best trained psychologists in the Israeli Army. I mean, there
was my direct commander. I was in a research unit
and my direct commander with a chemist. His train had

(14:00):
been in chemistry, absolutely a brilliant man, and we were
doing things that well, you know, I was assigned to
do things that I had no business doing, like setting
up an interviewing system for the Israeli Army, which I did,
and only recently I got a copy of the report

(14:24):
that I wrote in nineteen fifty six. It's fined by
Lieutenant Khanama with my number, very short number, because this
was really the beginning. I mean, the numbers now, the
soldiers numbers are much much longer. But and I described,
you know, how I had set up the interview, and

(14:47):
it turned out that that interview and everything around it
had a profound influence on my career and on my thinking.
And it's actually I'm really ending my career by repeating
the main principles that guided me when I did when

(15:08):
I created that interview in nineteen fifty six. So that's
this is surely an unusual and very fortunate experience because
the idea of the interview I had read a book
by Paul me I mean, my boss, the chemist, had

(15:29):
given me that book to read. It had just come out,
and I was very influenced by it and by the
idea that you really couldn't trust people's judgments and that
you wanted things to be as objective as possible. And
so I constructed instead of the clinical interview, where your
objective is before a mental image of your patient, of

(15:54):
your patient or the recruit, whoever. It is the system
that existed in Israeli only when it was a clinical
interview where people had to interview recruits and decided how
fit they were for combat. And there was enough information
to know that that interview was had no validity or whatsoever,

(16:15):
or almost none, and so I was assigned to improve
on it. And from Meil I learned that reliability is essential,
and so instead of having people form an intuitive opinion,
I had them rate six traits. That is, the interview

(16:39):
was divided into six parts, each associated with a particular
trait that they had to rate on a scale from
one to five at the end of each part of
the interview. And they were strongly discouraged from trying to
form a general image until all the information was in
And so that was that was the interview. And there

(17:04):
were interviews. I was like twenty two at the time
and they were twenty, but you know I was. I
was in charge, and they were furious with me, and
they were furious with me because they had been doing
those clinical interviews and they had been using their intuitions,

(17:27):
and they had been feeling very good about their intuitions.
And I remember one of them saying, you're turning us
into robots. That is because I you know, there were questions.
It was a semi structured interview. There was a list
of questions about each of several traits, like how punctual

(17:49):
you were, sociable you were. I had one that was
called masculine pride, which today you wouldn't want to use
that term, but at the time it seemed very fitting.
And so I told them, uh, you know, I realized

(18:09):
that the morale was at state that it was really
unacceptable to them not to have an outlet for their intuition.
And so I told them, you do the interview my way,
and don't worry about validity. You worry about reliability. I mean,
in my arrogance, I said, I will worry about the validity,

(18:29):
you worry about being reliable. But when you're done, close
your eyes and make a judgment of how good is
sober will that soldier be? And there are two stories
associated with that. The first one is that a few

(18:51):
months later we got data on the validity of the
interview for various criteria like being sent to of his
training or going to drail or different things that could
happen to a soldier, and that the interview was had
really significant polility. I mean, it was a big improvement

(19:13):
what had happened before. But what was quite remarkable in
the results with that intuitive judgment at the very end
was very good. In fact, it was just as good
as the average of the six ratings, which I thought
we would use, and it added information. So the final

(19:38):
score with the average of the average of the six
ratings and the final rating. Because that's what came out
that it was independently valid, and that stayed with me
all my life. That is that you should watch it.
You shouldn't trust intuition, but ultimately you have to have it,

(19:59):
and ultimately it's a wonderful thing, but you have to
delay it. And it turns out that in the book
that I'm writing and working on I was working on
until a couple of months ago, which is coming out
in May, we have a recommendation for how to make
judgements and the surface and break the problem great each

(20:20):
aspect of the problem, independently, delay intuition, then look at
the profile of your ratings and following your judgment. So
that stayed with me evidently for over sixty years.

Speaker 1 (20:34):
That's incredible. So the start of your psychology career in
a way showed you that there is a then intuition
can be spot on.

Speaker 2 (20:43):
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 1 (20:44):
That's that's that's really uh, that's that's really cool. And
then we're gonna we're gonna get to that later, the
intelligence of intuition for sure. So just to kind of
wrap up this early part of your life, after you
got your then you went and got a PhD right
from Berkeley, and your dissertation was advised by Susan Irvin

(21:06):
and examined relations between adjectives and the semantic differential. And
also you got a chance to do Fortron programming. I
think that you. I think you enjoyed it. I remember Pascal,
I think with programming in my childhood, but even before
Pascal was Fortron, right, so that was even before my
before Tron was the.

Speaker 2 (21:26):
Very first language that was accessible to non programmers. It
was a compiled language, but it was very very basic,
and I was actually, I think in the first or
second course that was ever given to sort of civilians
on the use of Fortramp was given at my nineteen sixty.

(21:47):
It lasted a week and that's where I learned Fortran one,
which was really that's when it that's when it began.

Speaker 1 (21:56):
It's the beginning, that's the beginning my.

Speaker 2 (22:00):
Thesis program, which so I spent most of the effort
was programming. It could take twenty minutes on the Berkeley mainframe,
and I could watch the Berkeley mainframe. You could watch it,
you know, from a window, and there were nine large
tape units and my program used them all and I

(22:23):
could tell whether the program was working by whether the
tapes were working in the proper sequence. Just think of
what it was then that with the Berkeley mainframe, the
main computer at the University of California in Berkeley, and
think of your iPhone today. So that's that's what's happened

(22:46):
in my lifetime.

Speaker 1 (22:48):
Well, we definitely have come a long way. It'll be
interesting to see where it is, like sixty years from now,
if it's going to be the same exponential rate. So
your early work focused on visual perception and attention. Your
first post was at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in
nineteen sixty one. How did you make a shift from
visual perception and attention, which are you know, staples of

(23:08):
the cognitive science field. I was trained in that everyone
in cognitive science peach that you start with that, you know,
I feel like, and then how did you move into
judgment decision making. I believe that was when you when
you met U Tavski, right, yeah, I.

Speaker 2 (23:22):
Mean Amastrski was a young colleague of mine at tab University,
were three years younger, and he was known to everybody
as the most brilliant person. And I invited him as
a guest in a seminar that I was teaching, and
he gave a talk in that sweminar on work not

(23:46):
that he had done himself, on work that was being
done at Michigan at the time, on the study that
was called the Study of Intuitists Decisions, and the conclusion
of that study was people are pretty good intuitive statisticerence.
So that's that's the work that he described. And I
had been teaching statistics, and I had had experiences about

(24:12):
how miserable people are, including myself, as intuitive statisticians. So
I knew this was wrong. And Israelis have a style
of debating that is world famous. It's quite merciless, and
so I engaged mostly in that debate in front of

(24:33):
the class, and it turned out to be a very
good conversation. I think I want that debate because that's
what started our joint work, which was basically questioning into
it statistics. So that's and then we became very close
friends and.

Speaker 1 (24:56):
The rest is history, so to speak.

Speaker 2 (24:59):
Yeah, in a way, I mean, it turned out that
this was a very important friendship. We dominated our lives
for you know, ten twelve years. We spent hours every
day together a nuts and there was really no no

(25:20):
separation between work and fun because work was so much fun.
And the study of because of the topic that they
had chosen. The topic that we had chosen was incorrect
intuitions and our subjects, we were our own subjects, so
we were looking for cases in which our own intuitions

(25:40):
were flawed. And that is a sort of ironic and
sort of very funny. And Amoson really extraordinary sense of humor,
and he loved laughing, and he made me laugh and
he made me he improved my sense of humor, so
I made him laugh. We left a lot, and that

(26:02):
was very happy.

Speaker 1 (26:05):
It's beautiful. So let me just get this straight. So
when you're in this meeting and you challenged him a
little bit about the positive aspects of intuition, was were
you drawing in your intuition to say that intuition isn't
as positive as he's made it out to be or
were you basing it on some other conclusion.

Speaker 2 (26:23):
The conclusion of that Michigan research whether that people are
essentially basian, which means that they make corrected from data,
except that they are conservative basian, that is, they do
not they do not draw enough from information. And I said,

(26:43):
this is absurd in fact, and I cited something that
they attributed to Denny Kay, who was then a very
famous comedian. Very little of him remains, but he had
described a person as a woman, and that's what I remember.

(27:05):
Turned out later that I mystery remembered some of it.
But as he said that her famous a favorite position
is besides herself, and her favorite sport is jumping to conclusions.
And this idea that people jump to conclusions is, you know,

(27:25):
when it's obvious that it takes very little for us
to form a complete image. And that was so clearly
incompatible with the idea of people being conservative Baysian that
it made that idea seem silly. I think anyway, I
still think so not everybody in reason. Well, that's that's

(27:51):
what set us up.

Speaker 1 (27:52):
I love it. You know, you talk about the importance
of adversarial you called adversarial collaboration. Now, what a perfect
example of a situation where you formed such a warm
friendship with someone. Well, this was you know, it wasn't
that adversarial. It wasn't adversar. Yeah, that's fair enough, that's fair.

Speaker 2 (28:11):
That's from the beginning.

Speaker 1 (28:13):
Well, maybe Gary Kleine fits more into that that that situation,
so we can we can talk about Gary Klein a second.
So this is a research that he had. Gary Klin
had been spending his career basically studying expertise intuition and
you know, firefighters and other fields and just how right
they can be when they do rely on their intuition.

(28:34):
And I think you two thought there were more areas
of disagreement than there really were when you finally got
your heads together to write a paper about it. Is
that right?

Speaker 2 (28:42):
Well, you know, it's it's a fairly complicated story I had.
You know, as I told you, I had always believed
that that there is own marvels to intuition. So I'd
never believed that that there is nothing to it. Uh,
And in fact I had I remember that they have
reviewed an early grant application by Gary and which I

(29:04):
had reviewed favorably when I was still in Jerusalem, very
long time ago. Uh, and so I invited Gary. I said, look,
I mean you and I have completely but it would
seemed to be completely contradictory beliefs. I mean you believe
in experts, I believe intuition. I question experts. I question intuition.

(29:25):
We must both be right. Let's find out where we're right.
So let's find out the boundary whereas intuition good and
where does it fail? And he agreed. And it's not
that it was easy. That took us six years. But
at the end of six years we had we had
the paper that was I think pretty good, and we

(29:48):
had a friendship we became. So that was the most
successful adversarial collaboration of my life.

Speaker 1 (29:56):
Beautiful. Well, can you remind me the title of the paper,
because I really liked the title when I saw it.

Speaker 2 (30:00):
Baber was a failure to disagree.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
A failure to disagree. I love that.

Speaker 2 (30:07):
It's that expert intuition of failure to disagree. I think
that's the fine. But a failure to disagree is certainly
in the time.

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You know you had written at one point you said,
I had limited ambitions. I didn't aspire to great success.
I was very hard working, but I didn't expect to
be a famous psychologist. So it's not like you had
these dreams when you're young, like I'm going to be
a famous psychologist. You sort of, in a sense, you know,

(31:44):
fell into these topics and then they captivated your interest
you and you did great work with them, you know,
I mean, how would you describe the situation? How are
you so great?

Speaker 2 (31:57):
Uh? Well, you know, I at that actually feeling that
my training had been inferior because I had, you know,
I'd been let loose in Berkeley. I really didn't study systematically.
I just read and I studied and picked up a
lot of things. And I remember that when I came

(32:17):
to Hebrew University, I decided that I would like eventually
to become a chef for everyone, saying, but first of all,
have to learn to be a short order cook. And
so I started as really very limited and very precise
experimental project and vision, which I continued for several years.

(32:39):
And I felt I was in training, that I was
training myself to become an experimental psychologist. And when I
met almost I mean I was starting me to become
slightly more ambitious. But I certainly had no I had

(32:59):
no expectations of any managor success. Now he was already
a star.

Speaker 1 (33:06):
Mm hmm.

Speaker 2 (33:07):
So he was a star from graduate school and immediately
recognize usself. I was good, but he was a star.
And uh, and then together we were I think better
than he was. I mean, we were far better than
either of us. And so I was very lucky, so

(33:30):
is he.

Speaker 1 (33:31):
It sounds like just a special just a really special
collaboration and once in a lifetime kind of collaboration that
people be very lucky to find in their careers.

Speaker 2 (33:41):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (33:41):
Yes, I I have a few people like that in
my life. I want to give a shout out to
Colin to Young and David Aiden and James Kaufman and
other researchers. You know, when you get when you get
these special people, you know in your academic collaborations, you
know you you want to hold on to them, you know.
Let's talk about System one versus system too. Could you

(34:04):
explain to our listeners a little bit about, well, just
how you would define the difference between the two before
we really nerd out about this.

Speaker 2 (34:11):
Well, there is a long history in psychology of the
distinction between automatic processing and control processing. And it started
out with the studies of search and how you start searching,
say for a letter for a particular target letter in

(34:35):
a set of letters, and you do that hundreds and
hundreds of times, you look for that letter, and eventually
that letter pops out that you search changes character, it
becomes something becomes automatic, and this is something that happens
in skill learning. We learn to drive and then you

(34:56):
can drive without thinking. You learn to speak a foreign
language and then you speak it without having to translate
from your original language. So we had that experience of
those two modes, and that's been studied fairly extensively, and
there were many people drawing on that distinction, and the

(35:19):
terms system one and system too were invented by one
of these the Oki Spanovich was also interested in the
field of judgment and decision making, so he was doing
research using problems that in Mostovskin I had developed. So
I was familiar with his work, and I really loved

(35:40):
that distinction between the two because it seemed to resolve
the controversy in which we had been involved. So we
did a lot of work on failures of intuitive thinking,
which were sort of failures of thinking. So we but

(36:00):
other people found that you could find create variations on
those problems, or create different contexts in which people could
solve those problems. So there seemed to be and they
questioned our conclusions. But it turned out that the distinction
between system one and system two is very useful in

(36:22):
this context because what these people had done, who found
that our errors they could make, as it were, cognitive
illusions disappear. It's a well known German psychologist, Good Gigorins
were sort of intellectual adversary on this, and that's this phrase.
It's a title of benefice paper making cognitivelusions disappear. But

(36:47):
you can make cognitivelusions disappear by providing cues that mobilize
control thinking so that you're not blurting out your intuitions,
but you act truly compute or your reason your way
to announce, and then con illusions do disappear, they can disappear.

(37:07):
And so that's what motivated me to adopt that distinction
as an essential distinction. With that it seemed to resolve
the controversy so far as I was concerned between a
good gig Renzer and ourselves. And then there was a
lot that you could do with that distinction, and eventually

(37:29):
that became the core of their role. Ten years later.

Speaker 1 (37:34):
This is great, So let's now let's just shift into
like colleague mode of nerding out at a really deep
level about this stuff. Because I was my dissertation. I
was so ensconced in all this work. I loved the
system one system two distinction as well. I read Robots
Rebellion by Keith Stanovich and it blew my mind, and

(37:54):
I realized that the field of intelligence research had completely
ignored the distinction it had treated. It had never even
like dawned on intelligence researchers in one hundred years to
think that maybe we should call some of these system
one processes intelligence.

Speaker 2 (38:11):
You know.

Speaker 1 (38:12):
So this was this was so I won't even know
where I'm coming from. I was just totally scoonched in
this work. And then started to do some research on
to see if there are individual differences in an intuitive,
unconscious system of intelligence of system one. And then when
I was digging into this research, I started to get
into all the debates. So some people argue that the

(38:33):
word system is not correct. Some people say, well, we
should call it types. So some research said, there's it's
really type one processes versus Type two processes because it's
a lot of different types of process under an overall umbrella. Right,
you have within system one you can have things as
varied from language learning to social Q learning to esthetic

(38:59):
intuition in too, et cetera, et.

Speaker 3 (39:01):
Cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 1 (39:02):
Yeah, there's a whole wide range of things that we're
labeling them all under or the same, just like it's
all this System one. And then with System too you
have a whole pot prairie of different forms of rationality.
You know Tkeith Stanovitch as he's gone through quite sensibly
and all through different types of different ways that you know,
we can use the rationality, use our system too thinking

(39:25):
to override O intelligence. Yes, so my question is you
have you stayed up on these these really uh these
really nerdy debates and where are you do you see merit?
Kind of Yeah, I think.

Speaker 2 (39:37):
It's a very important debate. Uh, And clearly, uh, there
is a tradition in psychology that you're not supposed to
invoke monculie a monculi being little people in the head
whose behavior explains a person's behavior, and System one and
System two are homuncula, So there's no question, you know,

(40:00):
I vary deliberately. In the book that I wrote, Thinking
Fast and Slow, I tried to get people to appreciate
the personalities of system one and system Now why did
I do that? And I explained that in the first
pages that actually type one and type two is the
proper terminology because there are broad types of mental activities.

(40:24):
But when you think of system one and system two,
you think of them as agents, and the mind is
specialized for thinking about agents and not about categories. So
agents have personalities, agents have tendencies, agents take action, agents
and goals, and we're ready for that. So it makes

(40:49):
it easier to think about psychology when you think of
those agents. So type one and type two they call
for lists, and people are miserable the lists. But people
are very good for very good apt is, finding routes,
roots in space, you know, path to go from one

(41:10):
place to the other. Were specialized for that, and we're
specialized for thinking about agents. Lists are terrible, and so
that's why I went to that language quite deliberately. So
those are fictions. There are no systems in the brain.
It's just a way of talking. But it's a very

(41:30):
useful way of talking. But the people who criticized me
on this, I think they may have had a point
because a couple of days ago I was talking to
undergraduates at Cornell who had questions about my book, and
they were speaking about system on and system two as

(41:50):
if there were agents in the head. They were not
thinking that this is an easy way of thinking about
type one and type which is what I intended. But
you know, they were asking, what what do system one
system to do in an inferant, you know, in a
dog or you know. None of that was what I

(42:13):
had really intended. So to some extent, there is a
risk of corrupting psychological thinking by bringing those a monculi
the risk is real. The risk is real.

Speaker 1 (42:27):
I agree. I agree with both the risk and the benefits.
And but you know, you see people in the general
public talking about this, and I noticed that some people
start to try to just as a shorthand map it
onto brain systems. Some people actually map it on to
like left brain versus right brain thinking, And that makes
my brain want to explode when I see that. You know, no,
it's not like you know that that's the problem with

(42:48):
you know, talking about it as two discrete categories, because
then people think, oh, so all this System one stuff
is here, all the System two stuff is when there's
such a very, very different process. Yeah, I think it's
just important as you do. And I want to give
you credit for mentioning this in your book. You know,
to kind of to not to not try to essentialize

(43:09):
it and not view them as agents. But people will
do it anyway in the general public who don't know
all the nuanced, you know, nerdy literature.

Speaker 2 (43:20):
But I think, you know, for professionals, you use that
language and it helps you think. But you always remember
that you can translate any anything that you say about
System one or System too, you can translate into a
more cumbersome but more accurate formulation Type one and Type two.
It's just easier to think about.

Speaker 1 (43:39):
Yeah, for sure. But just that you know, the general
idea and the robots rebellion. Yeah, the work Keith Stanevich
did just opened up a portal into my whole thinking
about fundamental issues of consciousness, of free will. You know,
I started to really think in grad school. I thought
I started to think the system to have more free
will than System one. You know, even just that question
I wanted talked. I wanted people to talk to me

(44:01):
about it, you know, like, and you know, what's some
of your thinking on free will? I mean, I think
we're probably both agreed that there's no magic free will.
There's no you know, we believe that, you know, in
determinism to a certain degree, but that there might still
be a free will worth wanting and does that and
if there is, is there any hope for in system
two or is there any hope for in system one?

Speaker 2 (44:24):
You have found I think the wrong person to talk with.
Fair Enough, I have the same response to questions about
free will and about consciousness. I mean, I know that
people find them very exciting, and somehow I don't, and
I don't because I don't know what it would look like.

(44:47):
I don't know what a solution would look like. And
to raise a problem when you have no idea of
what you would consider to be a solution, somehow, isn't
that is something that I'm not attracted to. I understand that,
you know, brilliant people, many people, people I respect, are
fascinated by these questions, but somehow they don't speak to me.

(45:11):
And I can see obviously people feel their free will obviously,
you know, brain is a physical object and with the
rule of the throne, and there seems to be a
tension between this feeling. But and altogether it's a mystery.

(45:32):
You know, how does feeling work in a world of objects?
How does consciousness interact with objects? But obviously it's a puzzle.
But it's a puzzle that I think we have no
way of even approaching and knowing what it would be
like to solve. And for some reason, I have that

(45:54):
block that if I can't imagine a solution, I don't
want to go into the problem.

Speaker 1 (45:59):
You know, I really appreciate that, and and and and
we certainly don't need to even go there to say
things like some system two processes such as cognitive control
and UH and UH and reasoning and problem solving give
us more freedom of or more degrees of freedom be.

Speaker 2 (46:17):
A voluntary I mean the basic distinction that I draw
between system one operations and system two operations. System one
operations are things you do, and so system two operations
are things you do, and system one operations happen to you.
So you know that distinction, if you is, if you

(46:38):
want to talk in terms of will of the will
or control obviously System two is control and System one
is not right.

Speaker 1 (46:46):
As soon as you it's uncontroversial to use, whereas the
control and freedom, as soon as you start saying free will,
then the philosophers and the people who care about that
get all mad because now you've you've entered their their
realm of lingual sticks. You know that no we're calling
free will is determined it, you know, for magical free will.
So from going back to the big bang and it's like, okay,

(47:07):
I'm sorry, yeah, so fair enough. Well, well here's a
topic I think does interest you. Because you reached out
to me Abou's eight eight years ago or so, I
was so deeply touched. I want you to know that
I almost fell off my chair. Actually, I was sitting
on my bed when I read your email, and I
said at the end, I got to the bottoms of

(47:28):
Dane o'connam and I almost fell off my bed. I
can't believe I got an email out of the blue from.

Speaker 3 (47:31):
Danna co but but but it was.

Speaker 1 (47:34):
It was in relation to my dissertation work on the
fact that there may be individual differences in System one.
And I'd love to talk to you about individual differences
because I know it's not a topic that you've devoted
your career to, but I believe you said to me
that if you could do a second career, you might
actually start to do some individual differences work. Is that right?

Speaker 2 (47:54):
Yeah, I'm not truly working on an individual difference with these.

Speaker 3 (47:59):
Days amazing, let's talk about it.

Speaker 2 (48:02):
Late in life. I've turned to that wonderful I belong
with team that is trying to understand the famous cognitive
reflection test. Then the bat and ball problem must be
familiar to all your listeners and trying to understand the
bat and ball problem. And Shane Frederick, who is the

(48:26):
sort of the found of that whole line of research,
he did that actually when he was a post stop
with me and we were writing a paper together which
was the first effort to distinguish system one and system two.
That's where we introduced the notions of the system one
and system two. And it's a key example the system

(48:49):
one and system two because I say a bat and
a ball together cost a dollar, then the bad cost
a dollar more than the ball how much the ball costs,
and you have an association and the association and expenses,
and you solve that problem as if you were said
a dollar ten is a dollar more then sense. That's

(49:12):
that seems to happen. Now, it turns out they're very
interesting individual differences. And some people fail that problem because
they fail problems. So that's a lack of aptitude of
one kind or another. But there is an interesting class
of people who fail that problem although they could easily

(49:35):
solve it. So fifty percent of Harvard students say ten cents. Now,
clearly if they bothered to check, they would know that
they made a mistake. And almost all of them, they
spent a minute or two would solve that problem. And
sow it's five sents. So what do we learn. We

(49:57):
learn they don't check that as we learn that their
system to accept the immediate association of system one. And
so there is that class of people who could solve
the problem but don't. And they're a very interesting group
of people. So they also tend to believe in conspiracy theories.

(50:20):
They tend to believe in bullshit of all kinds. They
are different from other intelligent people in multiple ways.

Speaker 1 (50:28):
You know, something I think that's worth bringing up here
is Seymour Epstein's distinction between the experiential mind and the
rational mind. I had the great pleasure of having Seemer
Epstein on my podcast a couple of years ago, and
he felt, quite frankly, he felt as though his dual

(50:50):
process theory had not gotten as much attention as he
wished it could have. So, out of honor to him,
who he's no longer with us, I wanted to bring
this up because I think there was a lot of
merit in his work linking the experiential mind to superstition
and to conspiracy theories and all sorts of things. So, yeah,
I want to hear some of your thoughts he had.

Speaker 2 (51:11):
He had every reason to be upset with people, including
and certainly with me, because I don't think I mentioned
his work in Thinking Fast and Slow, and I certainly
should have done, because it was relevant, it was creative,
but I actually did not know enough and I didn't

(51:31):
think of including it. So he was absolutely right. Had he,
in fact, I think, had been there with that distinction,
which is one of those dichotomies that were that people
were working on in the eighties and nineties. It had
been there early, I think before the system one system
two distinction was was forming through. And he had some

(51:54):
brilliant examples of it. It's a beautiful example of that.
That well, similar to the kind of thing that damas
Uski and I had done that he attributed to the
experiential the mode of thinking. So yes, that is a
really great I have which is not not doing more

(52:15):
with his work in my book, because.

Speaker 1 (52:19):
That's really that's incredibly gracious of you to say that
I formed like a friendship with him in the last
couple of years of his life. And he actually asked
me if i'd write the foreword to his to his
book on the on the summarizing his life's work. So
I hope that I honored it. He seemed to be
happy with the with the foreword, so it just it
made it made me happy to see him feel as though,

(52:42):
you know, even.

Speaker 2 (52:44):
I heard that he felt agreed. Uh and and and
I'm sorry about my part.

Speaker 1 (52:53):
Well, that's incredibly gracious view. It's it's obviously not just
it's not you, it's it's a whole you know, system
of assist like using the word system, but of there's
so many profiation of different dual process theories. You know,
someone wrote a review of like forty to fifty different
dual process theories. You can't you know, you can't to

(53:14):
be fair to you for a second. It's not like,
you know, you can write about every single one and
all the different nuance when you're to write a popular book,
you know.

Speaker 2 (53:23):
So yeah, yeah, so I just adopted that tominology. In fact,
I described my interpretation with those systems are I didn't
try to do justice to the intellectual history of it.
But he really had made contributions that I you know,
if I had thought more carefully, I could have included

(53:44):
than I didn't.

Speaker 1 (53:46):
Beautiful. I'm touched by even your response to that. So yeah,
it's just like the individual differences aspects. So there is
this is the insight I had, and I want you
to tell me what you think of this. In my dissertation,
there just was so much of a focus on individual
differences and system two. I mean, Keith Danovich it's all

(54:06):
the individual system too. And he and Keith Stanach had
a line in one of his papers where he said
individual difference system one or minimal or just not even
worth considering. So I said, I was like, oh, hell no,
you know, I'm working my dissertation and this is what
I wanted to directly challenge my dissertation I feel like
this area of individual differences in system one has really

(54:28):
been long neglected in the field of cognitive science.

Speaker 2 (54:32):
You know.

Speaker 1 (54:32):
I found that that they're in pus A learning. For instance,
your ability to probabilistically we're in the rule structure of
the very complex rule structure of the world was correlated
almost zero with IQ. So you have people who have
conscious ability to detect patterns who aren't terribly necessarily good
necessarily it's it's zero correlation, So it can go either way,

(54:55):
you know, with their ability to unconsciously detect complex patterns.
I thought that was interesting.

Speaker 2 (55:01):
What do you think, well, I think it is very interesting.
The question that I was impressed by. I was thinking
system mons slightly differently than you did in my concern
with individual differences when I approached you. And this, for me,
system one is where we have representations of the world,

(55:24):
so that our model of the world is in associative memory,
and that for me is in the essence of system one.
And clearly some people have people are very different models
of the world. Some of them are more accurate than others,
some are richer, some are poorer, and there are all
those individual differences in the representation of the world that

(55:48):
people form and maintain and use to simulate the world
or to make predictions what will happen, to generate explanations
of what could happen. There must be individual differences in that,
and I didn't find any adequate treatment of that aspect,
of the richness aspect. You're absolutely right. The detecting patterns,

(56:13):
which is what you were focused on, would be part
of that general problem, and I was interested in forming patterns.

Speaker 1 (56:22):
Makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
I think.

Speaker 1 (56:24):
I think part of the bias in the field is
that is the field has a bias towards scientific reasoning
as the pinnacle of human achievement. And what bothered me
is that arts achievement was really neglected. And so what
I wanted to do was open up this whole world
to individual differences in the experiential mind being linked to

(56:44):
artistic and esthetics and so and it did so when
I found these individual differences, I found there were linked
to opens to experience, the personality trait, which then opened
up the whole world of creativity and the arts and
all these things that like you know that I feel
the judgment and reasoning literature is they're not terribly excited
about they're not excited about this arts the arts, you know.

Speaker 2 (57:08):
Do you know what I mean? I think that's very interesting,
and you're absolutely right. It's it's very largely neglected. And yeah,
and that whole tradition of work on thinking and reasoning
and judgment and decision making. Uh, it's really although it

(57:29):
doesn't believe in logic as an explanation of psychology, but
it's infused with it's a reaction to logic. It's always
logic is always there, and the kind of thing that
you're talking about, logic isn't even there.

Speaker 1 (57:45):
And that's okay, And that's okay, it's almost there was
such a bye. I felt that there was this meta
bias in the bias literature towards like emotions are always
that's well, that's bad. We've got to count all the emotions. Yeah,
I think you're absolutely But thank you for having that

(58:06):
that conversation, because I've been wanting to kind of really
nerd out with you at that level of specificity. So
let's move into hedonism or hedonic psychology. Let's move into
herdonic psychology. So that is the work you started doing
in the nineties when you're kind of moving from judgment
decision making too to this Why how did you move

(58:26):
into that area? Was it was it did Ed Diner
influence you at all?

Speaker 2 (58:30):
No? No, okay, I moved into that area because of
the puzzle. The puzzle uh that that came up when
Emerson and I were working on the decision making prospect,
the publisher prospect theory, which deals with the curvature of

(58:53):
utility functions or value functions, that we don't respond linearly
to amounts of money, but that the response changes. That is,
a difference of one hundred dollars makes a very big
difference if you have one hundred dollars in terms of
two hundred, But if you have ten thousands and it's
ten thousand one hundred, the difference is psychologically much smaller.

(59:15):
So there is that basic psychophysical fund But I posed
the following puzzle. I said, suppose you are supposed to
get injections, painful injections in the buck one a day,
and you don't habituate to that they are painful to

(59:38):
the same degree. Now, how much would you pay to
reduce the number of injections from twelve to two and
from twenty to ten? Would you pay the same amount,
and the intuition is you wouldn't pay the same amount.

(59:59):
The intuition is you would pay more to reduce from
twelve to two than from twenty to ten, because psychologically
it's a bigger difference. But that's ridiculous because the amount
of pain that you're adding by by construction is the same.
So in both cases you're saving yourself ten days of

(01:00:20):
pain exactly the same. So that turns out. It turns
out that the logic of think when you think about
experiences doesn't fit the logic when you think about making
decisions and about numbers. So that was the puzzle that
led me into studying experience. So, and that's another way

(01:00:45):
of looking at the basic concept of utility in economics
and in sort of decision theory. Utility is infilled from choices,
from preferences. But thinking of utility at the utility as
an experience that was non existence in the field. I mean,

(01:01:07):
Bentham had those ideas centuries ago, but in the field
of decision making, that idea was absent and absolute in economics.
So that's that's how I got to.

Speaker 1 (01:01:21):
Well, that is really cool and uh and and it
just it's just fixed the whole like there were a
whole bunch of influence of things of that was like
in the air because a Diner started soon after started
studying life satisfaction as even before or even before it
wasn't okay.

Speaker 2 (01:01:40):
You know, Dina had been in the field of well
being a long time, the eighties, his entire career. He's
the younger than I am, but not by whom. But yeah,
in the early eighties he had a classic review, so maybe.

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):
Gotcha.

Speaker 2 (01:02:04):
But I moved into experiences of episodes like, you know,
an episode of a medical procedure, an episode of watching
a pleasant or unpleasant film that lasts a few minutes.
How do you evaluate experiences? And from there I got
to the study of well being.

Speaker 1 (01:02:23):
So that was the that I well, it was an
important bridge and it was an important distinction that it's
what allowed us to see this core distinction between the
experiential self and the remembered self. You know, ed Diner's
work seems to be the remember itself. You're taking a
self report questionnaire and it's saying, overall, how happy are

(01:02:44):
you with your life? And you're trying to reflect back
on it. You know, in a lot of ways you
were kind of bringing some of the even like the
Mehi chick sent me high approach, you know, like you
developed another one. He did experience sampling, but I believe
you developed another technique that was really cool.

Speaker 2 (01:02:59):
By the way, had that distinction. He described well being
as being satisfied with your life, having positive affect, a
lot of positive effect and very little negative effect. So
that was his concept. I came to that distinction between

(01:03:19):
the two completely independently, really, but Ed had had it,
and like the entire field was focused on life satisfaction,
that is the measures. The idea of measuring well being
by measuring experience that that was really largely absent. Now

(01:03:44):
six and behind had done experienced sampling, so he had
studied that, but it was not perceived as a measure
of well being. It was not an And that's where
the work that we did came in.

Speaker 1 (01:03:58):
This is great, thank you for helping like talk me through.
So I get all the timelines right. I wanted to
get it right. I wanted to get right. So that
makes a lot of sense to me. Okay, Then Martin
Selgman he comes into the picture. Okay, So nineteen ninety
eight he starts this field positive psychology. So do you
you've had some criticisms of the field of positive psychology.

(01:04:20):
I'd love to hear what some of your current thinking is,
because I because I do think the field has evolved.
I think the field did start out mostly focused on
happiness and and and subjective well being, but has now expanded.
Do you have researcher studying meaning the science of meaning connections?

(01:04:41):
You know, very various, you know, multi dimensional aspects of
the of the overall well being construct. So so I'm
wondering where you are today and your your own thinking
about the field.

Speaker 2 (01:04:52):
So I was interested in the fact that there are
those two definitions of happiness. I mean, one of them
is life this action, and the other is the average
level of affect in your experience. And actually you can
measure them independency without going into detail, and they depend

(01:05:12):
on different things. So the quality of experience, the average
quality of your experience, really depends primarily on social context
and on love and on how much time you spend
with people you love. And that's those other things that
determine emotional happiness. Life satisfaction is determined much more conventionally

(01:05:35):
by a success by how much you achieve relative to
and that's income and education and prestige, and they contribute
and sort of living a conventionally successful life. That is,
to be married, to have children, not to be divorced,
not to be involved in litigation, stuff like that. That's

(01:05:56):
life satisfaction. So I was interested in that distinction, which
is not the same distinction as between meaning and well being.
So that's right. So I never did much with the
meaning of life in a way it's related to the
issue of consciousness that we were talking about speak to me.

(01:06:21):
But the main that is when I was thinking, because
I started out interested in experience, that the meaning of
life is part of life satisfaction, which I thought was secondary.
And now several people, including Paul Dolan in the UK,

(01:06:42):
who was my post doctor, have tried with some success,
I think limited success, to say that people have experience
of meaning in real time, and that's an interesting issue.
My focus on this and well, what happened to me

(01:07:03):
first was that I thought that experience is really the
definition of well being, and that what people think about
their lives, doesn't you know, that's an epi phenomenon. Secondary.
It turned out that I couldn't be right, because what
people want in their life. The decisions they make have

(01:07:26):
very little to do with how happy they're going to be.
They're searching for life satisfaction. So to have a definition
of well being that doesn't correspond to what people want
for themselves, that wasn't the big success. So I went,
I just gave up on that. So that's one and
the other criticism might have of the whole wellbeing movement

(01:07:52):
that it's really diametrically opposed in some sense to Selligment's points.
I think there isn't enough for some misery, that is all.
And I think that as a social objective for society,
the maximization of well being is secondary, but minimizing suffering

(01:08:15):
is an objective that we get all agree on, and
as an objective for policy. Instead of setting happiness as
a measure of policy, setting the reduction of misery as
an objective for policy would result in very different activities.
And I think, you know, ethically it's the right thing

(01:08:38):
to do. But so that's my response to the currents.

Speaker 1 (01:08:44):
Will be so first of all, how do you define suffering?
Let me just ask you that question, like, what do
you even how do you even operationalize such a thing?

Speaker 2 (01:08:53):
Well, that there are various ways. So the obvious way
is experienced samply, where you periodically, you know, you bring
people on their phone today and to ask them to
answer a few questions about how they feel right now
and about what they are doing. We develop the technique

(01:09:13):
that we call the day reconstruction method, which is that
at the end of the day, you sort of recreate
the story of your day in episodes, and you evaluate
the emotional tone and you describe the emotions associated with
each episode, and then you can get an integral of
the emotions so you can talk about the average emotion

(01:09:36):
over the day for individuals. That's that's how you can
operationalize it. Now, suffering is relatively easy to define because
you'd say of people that they suffer when they're in
a state that they would want to escape. So that

(01:09:59):
is operational much easier to define than happiness means it's
wanting to it's wanting this to end. Oh, I want
to avoid this, I want to escape this. That's suffering
for me, and it's well defined and it's It turns
out that you know a few sample in the United States,

(01:10:19):
so we did the same thing in France. When you
look at a lot of people and take the average
over time. You know, ten fifteen percent of the overall
time of the population is spent in a negative emotional state,
and that is very unevenly distributed in the population. A

(01:10:45):
minority of people do most of the suffering and the
illnesses associated with it. Poverty, extreme poverty is associated with it.
So there are categories of people who do most of
the suffering and most of the rest of us suffer relatively.
We vary in how happy we are, and you know,

(01:11:08):
but that's that's genetically determined optimism. But there it's easy
to measure suffering.

Speaker 1 (01:11:19):
Yeah, I appreciate that clarification. I I I have made
the point to Marty as as people in his orbit
call Martin Seligam, and we call Marty because I worked
with him closely for for five Did you know that
I ended up working with him five for five years
after we met in New York. I ran something called
the Imagination Institute with him. But anyway, I have I

(01:11:41):
have made the point often that that one what one
needs is not just learned hopefulness. They need real hope.
Like you can't just focus on psychological hope as the
intervention and and ignore the fact that people need to have.
You know, if you're languishing in poverty and there's not
much cues of hope in your environment, we need to

(01:12:03):
work on that too. So I definitely agree.

Speaker 2 (01:12:06):
Yeah, yeah, I mean that's been a very significant predicesm
I think of positive psychology, which is that, in a
deep sense, it's a very conservative approach. That is, you
want to train the way that people feel about their lives,
but that means you're not trying to train their lives.

(01:12:27):
And that's the point that you were making right now,
I think that you want to change people's lives and
not yes.

Speaker 1 (01:12:38):
But but I'm going to add a butt here because
I think I'm going to try to argue as well,
there's still value to that research and to the field
of positive psychology. That couldn't one make the case that
that that those who getting them above the zero line
is that that will rise the tide for humanity. You know,

(01:13:00):
in a way, analogous argument and debate is happening in
the gifted education field and education, so you could, I think,
perhaps extrapolate your argument to the to that field and say, well,
we really should focus all of our resources on remediation,
on helping the students who are most poor poor, uh
and and those who lack educational opportunities. But couldn't one

(01:13:24):
argue that that it's a false dichotomy that we should
be helping both because you know, we don't want those
who are gifted, you know, students to fall between the
cracks either because they're ultimately going to rise the tide
for all of humanity? Is it? What do you what
do you make of that?

Speaker 2 (01:13:39):
Well, I think it's I think it's a false dichotomy
and it's a false analogy, fair enough, because education is
a resource that to supply, and the question is who
are we supplying it too? Now, happiness is not a
results that we supply. I mean, it's not a society

(01:14:00):
distributing happiness. So people are living their lives and objectively,
and the question is how much and what resources and
what focus we want to put on improving the way
people feel about their lives or in actually reducing suftwering. Now,

(01:14:22):
it's not that I'm against you. Some of my best
friends are positive psychologists, so I'm not I'm not against
positive psychology. One of my heroes is Richard Laird in
the UK.

Speaker 1 (01:14:37):
Oh wow, that would make him feel You're really good
to know. I'm going to tell him that you just
called him one of your heroes.

Speaker 2 (01:14:43):
I mean, he knows that we're I introduced, actually I am.
I mean he gives me credit for his career in
well being because he became interested in well being because
of me. And I pointed him too. He actually came
to instant to think about being with me and we
stay friends.

Speaker 1 (01:15:06):
Both are both legends. You're what's within say that.

Speaker 2 (01:15:11):
Again, we were born within ten days.

Speaker 3 (01:15:14):
I did not know that.

Speaker 1 (01:15:16):
So yeah, and I know that you're not against the
field of posit psychology. There's also you know, there's just
a lot of nuances here that my brain's just going
off in lots of different directions. So there's also an
interesting distinction to be made, an important distinction to made
between the science of well being and the application of
the science of well being. So certainly you have no

(01:15:38):
issue with a good, rigorous science of well being, right.

Speaker 2 (01:15:42):
And it is possible, And I think this is what
Richard Laird is doing specifically in the UK. He has
he has interventions to improve happiness. But but I think
measurement is in the background. It's going to be evidence

(01:16:04):
face and his major contribution to well being has been
a massive effort to provide cognitive behavioral therapy is large
government budgets. He's a member of the House of Lords
and he started at that movement there and had a

(01:16:27):
lot of influence on both labor and conservatives and increase
together with Professor Clark from Oxford, the clinical psychologists, they
have really trained the face of comnitive behavior therapy and
greatly improved it. And all of that is very strictly
evidence based, and so you can do rigorous applied psychology of.

Speaker 1 (01:16:56):
I actually want to tell you about a paper that
I wrote with my colleagues Allan Goodman, actually she was
the lead author, found Goodman, David Disbato, and Todd Kashton.

Speaker 3 (01:17:04):
What we wanted to do is we wanted to.

Speaker 1 (01:17:06):
Look because I think a lot of this is a
measurement issue with solve a problem with self report within
the field. We wanted to see what is the lead
and what was the correlation between subjective well being measure
you know, just simply how satisfy fight with your life
and the latent factor of all these other kinds of
tests of uh facets of well being that have been
developed like meaning and positive relationships and all this. We

(01:17:30):
found a point nine nine to eight correlation. But to
I'll send you the paper, a point nine to eight
correlation between you know, the standard subjective well being measure,
a couple of items, and a very very COMPREHENDI the
latent factor of a very comprehensive battery, a multi dimensional
of well being. I think it's very very hard in

(01:17:51):
this field to rely on self report and and because
of a lot of issues you've pointed out in your
own career of retrospective thinking. What you do when you
take one of these questionnaires is you tend to think,
you know, if you're in a good mood, or you
tend to have a good positive evaluation of your life.
You tend to on average say, oh yeah, everything's good.

(01:18:11):
You know, positive relationships are good. Oh yeah, I got
meaning too, Oh yeah, I got you know. And so
it's hard, it's really hard statistically to separate out a
lot of things that we conceptually say are very clear distinctions,
like meaning and positive emotions. But anyway, we just we
think there's some real methodological issues here.

Speaker 2 (01:18:32):
I mean, you know what you're going to do when
you extract a single factor. From many measures, you are
going to extract a single factor, and that single factor
could very well correspond to less satisfaction. But it's the
same as an intelligence. You have many tests, you can
extract a single factor, and there are still varieties of intelligence, miracles,

(01:18:54):
spatial vocabulary. So the fact that you can extract a
single dominant actor and find a good measure for it
really does not exclude the possibility I think, uh, that
that you could also find discriminations.

Speaker 1 (01:19:11):
Well, I think, yeah, just data a little further nuanced
to what we found.

Speaker 3 (01:19:15):
I mean with with the wait.

Speaker 1 (01:19:17):
With structural modelings, you know, you can do look at
different models, and what I think is interesting is that
like the one factor model of of all these disparate
things was a better fit than some than than parsing
them out, you know, in other various ways.

Speaker 2 (01:19:34):
I haven't seen your paper. I would just say that
there is a fair amount of research I think that
indicates that h different circumstances and different personality types are
associated with different emotions, and so some people are angry

(01:19:54):
and other people are depressed, and that both negative states.
But uh, trying to pull them into one factor. You
will not deny the difference between You will not deny
the difference between joy and contentment, because there clearly is
a difference between pleasure and contentment, and between anxiety and

(01:20:16):
depression or anxiety and anger. So there are there are
varieties of feelings associated, and most of them are clearly
positive or negative. But but but, but but they are
multi dimensional.

Speaker 1 (01:20:33):
So sure, for sure, I I don't want to argue
they're not multidimensional, but I think it's harder to get
at it with the self report questionnaires. I guess it
is the point. I mean, you're doing a retrospective evaluation. Well,
we need I think we need more of your kind
of techniques of moment to moment sampling of these various things.

Speaker 2 (01:20:54):
You know, there is research indicating you know, I uh oh,
the Stone of the USC who might collaborated twenty years
ago in the study of well being. He is a
master in the study of experience sampling, and he was
one of those who developed the day reconstruction method, which

(01:21:16):
is retrospected, and he had good results indicating that actually
you capture experience quite well if by retrospective judgments of
experience at the end of the day. Yeah, there's a
lot of evidence for that, so that if you focus

(01:21:38):
people on their emotional experience, so they remember them, I
mean not perfectly, there are distortions, but on the average
they remember them. What is very different is when I
ask you for a general evaluation of your life, you
are going to do something entirely different. You are going

(01:21:59):
to look at your life compare it to other people's life.
You're not going to analyze your emotional experiences.

Speaker 1 (01:22:09):
That's really interesting. A lot of this research is asking
you on your whole thinking about your whole life. You know,
what is your meaning, what is your positive experiences? And
now it's really super interesting. The wealth and happiness link
is another very very interesting one, and you had published
research showing that above about seventy five one thousand per

(01:22:31):
year income, it splits off. So you don't see much
more return on your investment in terms of the experience,
but you do see still see increase in life satisfaction.
Is that the basic finding?

Speaker 2 (01:22:46):
Yeah, I mean that's a gallop has been studying well
being since the early two thousand. I was a consultant
with them, and I was actually instrumental in their adding
questions about ethic and about emotion to their questionnaires, so
that they have a measure that allows you that they

(01:23:10):
also have a general measure of life satisfaction, the ladder
of life so called, which is essentially life satisfaction. So
they have both, and we studied and they have both.
And I'm Dino was a consultant with them. I was
a consultant with them. That's that's how it began. And

(01:23:32):
in the Gallop data, it's absolutely clear that when you
look at experience then in the United States, about about
seventy five thousand dollars, it really flattens. I mean, we
Angus Deaton, the economists, famous economists, Angus Deaton and I

(01:23:52):
did that study where we found absolutely no increase in
emotional satisfaction beyond seventy five thousand dollars. I think there
have been data don't find a slight increase, but it's
clear that there is some inflection and that the curve
for life satisfaction is different and steeper, and that life

(01:24:14):
satisfaction continues increasing beyond that. Now, there has been a
study recently by killings Worth which shows using different techniques
and so on, which seems to show of shows that
emotions keep improving with income. So we have two discrepanty results.

(01:24:39):
There is no question that our result is solid and replicable,
and there is no real explanation so far at the
discrepancy that is. What happened is that Killing's Worth is
more recent. I mean, this is something that happens all
the time in psychology and social sciences. The more recent
paper is assumed to do justice to everything that happened

(01:25:04):
before it, and Killing's Worth interpretation of why his results
are different from ours is, of course it blains our
research and that our researchers that. But in fact it's
perfectly clear that I think he has explanation of the
discrepancy doesn't hold water. And I have no idea what

(01:25:27):
the explament, what the true explanation is, So we'll have
to look at it more closely.

Speaker 1 (01:25:34):
But I'm really curious. Yeah, I want to see how
that gets right, so am I.

Speaker 2 (01:25:38):
I mean, I'm sure there is an answer, and I'm
pretty sure we'll find it, but we don't know. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:25:47):
I feel like regardless of whatever the veracity of that
turns out to be, there still is a deeper truth,
which is how one spends one's money and one's time
is going to be a better predictor of one's happiness
than the specific money that you have above a certain point.
Isn't that fair to say?

Speaker 2 (01:26:07):
That is certainly fair to say that how you spend
your time. So that is a direct implication of thinking
about emotion, is that whether you spend your time commuting
or with your children makes a big difference your emotional
happiness over a day. I mean, you know two days
that you could two hours each day that you could

(01:26:28):
spend this way or that way makes a big difference.
So that's doubt would be the case.

Speaker 1 (01:26:36):
Yeah, I would love to talk about your new book Noise. Okay,
what in the world is the difference between bias and noise?
And why is noise rarely recognized in conversations about human error.

Speaker 2 (01:26:51):
Well, when you think of measurements using a ruler to
measure a line, if you make multiple measurements, they will
not be accurate, and they will vary, they will not
be the same from time to time. The average error

(01:27:14):
is the bias and they and the variability is noise.
And so there are clearly that both sources of inaccuracy
because if bias is zero, but measurements are all over
the place, they're just on average, they are correct, they're
still not accurate. Now, there is a way of measuring error,

(01:27:38):
of measuring accuracy, which is accepted in all the sciences.
It's been around for since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
It's associated with Frederick Gauss and and there is that measure,
particular measure. In that measure, the total measure of error

(01:28:02):
is the square of the bias and the square of
the noise, where noise is measured by the standard deviation.
So in a theory of error, which is the accepted theory,
bias and noise have equivalent roles the average error and
the standard deviation of error. This is something that people

(01:28:24):
really don't think about. Now. It's natural for people to
think of bias because bias is an error, I mean,
it's it represents something you can imagine what it is.
Variability is much more harder to represent and much harder

(01:28:44):
to think about, and much harder to realize the role
of variability in inaccuracy in error. So that's bias and noise.
Now where do you find noise, Because it's a very
abstract thing. If you look judges looking at the same case,
their sentences will actually be all over the place, and

(01:29:07):
the standard deviation in one of the studies with the
average sentence with seven years, the standard deviation with three
point eight. That means that a defendant faces a lottery
depending on which judge will be assigned her. That is unacceptable.
There is noise in medicine. There is noise in the

(01:29:33):
evaluation of assets. There is noise in the assignment of
children to foster care. There is noise in patents. So
there is noise everywhere. So those are differences that should
not exist. That's variability that should not exist in those systems.

(01:29:55):
In addition, there is variability within the individual. That is,
the same judge will not give the same sentence. Depending
on temperature. Sentences are harsher on hot days. People assign
heavier sentences the day after the football team losers. So

(01:30:17):
that's that's noise within a judge. Anyway, that's noise, and
that's what all else. Maybe some book is about written
with two collaboratives.

Speaker 1 (01:30:30):
It's it's fascinating and I'm trying to wrap my head
around this. With like i Q testing and you want
the signal is you know the true IQ score, and
you never ever know the true IQ score. You only
have like a you have a range of in your
how how uh you know you have confidence intervals? You know,
how can you? And there are lots of demands you

(01:30:52):
talk about in there, But I am really curious in
double clicking on in UH in personnel selection and kind
of the use of these standardized tests as well well
in for college selection. Do you do you see a
lot of noise in college admissions or.

Speaker 2 (01:31:05):
There's a lot of noise in college admissions. Yeah, there's
a lot of noise in hiring. I mean that's well known.
There's a lot of noise in personal evaluation. I mean
the conclusion in studies of the evaluations that employees get
that the ratings that get the ratings are more predictable.

(01:31:25):
You can predict ratings better if you know who did
the rating, then if you know who the at is.

Speaker 3 (01:31:33):
So that's problematic.

Speaker 2 (01:31:37):
Noise is generally problematic and frequently completely ignored. It's assumed
a way. You're right.

Speaker 1 (01:31:46):
So not that you need me to say you're right,
but you're right, you're right.

Speaker 3 (01:31:50):
Well, yeah, this is important. This is important.

Speaker 2 (01:31:54):
I need people to say I'm right on this one.

Speaker 3 (01:31:58):
No, it's so important.

Speaker 1 (01:31:59):
We're let's talk about how this relates to the proliferation
of diversity and inclusion initiatives in hiring practices because they're
focused on reducing bias, right, But how could they benefit
perhaps from also considering noise? I thought, I thought about that.

Speaker 2 (01:32:21):
It turns out that the major source of error in
many decisions is actually noise and not biased. So, for example,
you have bail judges who decide whether to keep somebody
incarcerated or release them before trial. And clearly you want
to minimize crime, and clearly you want to minimize unnecessary

(01:32:45):
incarceration of people. But it turns out when you look
at it carefully, there are huge differences between judges and
who they release and who they don't. So there have
been large scale studies with hundreds of thousands of decisions
by thousands of judges, which make it very clear that

(01:33:07):
a defendant facing a bail decision is facing a lottery,
as that depends a lot on you know who the
judge is, and because different judges have different tastes about
who should get there. From the point of view of
an organization, suppose you have an organization that is doing hiring. Now,

(01:33:29):
if there is a bias, then then of course there
will be errors. But suppose there is no overall bias.
I suppose you have an organization that is where half
of the people who make hiring decisions are biased in
favor of women and half are biased against them. So

(01:33:52):
overall there is no bias, but clearly something is wrong
with that organization. And what's wrong is noise. So there
is real bias at the individual level and sometimes at
the organizational level, and and bias at the individual level

(01:34:12):
when the when there are differences between individuals creates. Notice,
I see, and there is a lot of that.

Speaker 1 (01:34:20):
Yeah, so a different way of framing it.

Speaker 3 (01:34:23):
I really like this.

Speaker 1 (01:34:25):
Well, bias is, obviously, we're both agreed, very very important
to address and to become aware of. But in some
ways bias can be almost easier to see and as
as a problem, then.

Speaker 2 (01:34:35):
Noise can be easy. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (01:34:37):
Yeah, I think that's what we're saying, and that's the
point about Yeah, I get it, I get it. I
love it. I'm so glad that you that you you
put pointed a finger at it. So you talk about
ways of trying to make this reduce ways of reducing noise.
You talk about decision hygiene. What are some examples of
decision hygiene?

Speaker 2 (01:34:58):
Well, uh, first of all, the concept of hygiene and
what it's and the idea was to distinguish hygiene from
medication of vaccination. That is, when you're medicating or vaccinating
or doing surgery, you're dealing with a specific illness and
you're trying to combat a specific illness. When you wash

(01:35:20):
your hands, you don't know it germs, you're protecting yourself.
That's hygiene. So and if you're successful, you will never
know because you won't get the disease. So there is
a whole category of steps and procedures that you are
more likely to think about when you think about hygiene.

(01:35:43):
When you think about then about noise really and reducing noise,
then you think when you're trying to minimize bias. And
an example of hygiene is that when we started with
when I was describing my work in the Israeli Army,
that is, when you have a decision problem, instead of

(01:36:06):
trying to develop an intuition about the problem as a whole,
breaking up the problem intwo segments, evaluating each segment in
a fact based way, and then having a global evaluation
which can be intuited. That is hygiene. That's an improvement
that will reduce noise, reduce bias, and improve decisions. And

(01:36:31):
there are other steps that belong to decision hygiene, like
making judgment comparative. So people are we are not very
good at making absolute judgments how good something is or
how much money something is worth. We're much better at
making comparative judgment that this candidate is better than that candidate,

(01:36:54):
or this object is worth more than that object. So
you get much less noise and much more accuracy in
relative judgments absolute, So trying to switch people to make
comparative judgements and providing them with comparative scale that are
easy to use. That's decision that's a stick in decision hype.

(01:37:17):
And we have a few more.

Speaker 1 (01:37:19):
And all this falls in the brail of you know,
a noise audit. That's I like this idea of a
noise audit that you go to a workplace and maybe
they will have noise audit consultants or something someday. You
know that that could be a new field where you
go in and armed all it. Oh yeah, all these principles.
I found the quote that I really liked to illustrate
the point where we're just talking to about before you

(01:37:41):
said bias has a kind of explanatory charisma which noise lacks.
I love that quote. I love it, yeah, because it's
so true. A lot of people are talking about bias
right now, but I just I don't. I don't see
noise as much on the on the radar.

Speaker 2 (01:37:54):
That's rue, and the omission is so obvious that we
wanted to do something about it. That's when the book wonderful.

Speaker 1 (01:38:04):
You know, how have you just a general couple of
general questions about your life? You know, how do you
think you've grown over the course of your life? You know,
I saw an interview did with Sam HARRISY asked you
if studying biases your whole life has made you less biased,
and you said no, not really.

Speaker 3 (01:38:20):
You said, not really, but but there are.

Speaker 1 (01:38:22):
There are other dimensions to oneself than their cognitive biases.
You know, as a whole person. How do you think
you've grown in your life?

Speaker 2 (01:38:31):
Well, I mean you change, you developed some wisdom, and
the wisdom is that the number of things that you
get very excited about diminishes, and that you look at

(01:38:51):
things from a greater distance and with somewhat more objectivity,
and those things happen with age. I mean, it's not
just if you live long enough and you don't lose
your marbles completely, this will happen to you. Ah, this
is you know, it's growth in a certain sense, but
it also it's because when you grow old, you also

(01:39:15):
become detached and you are less part of the action,
and you're less involved and you're less relevant, and all
that enables you too to be wise and detected. So
it's not all growth, you know, as a very good thing.
It's also that you are moving from the center of

(01:39:37):
the action, and this is inevitable.

Speaker 1 (01:39:40):
M And with the cognitive biases in particular, you know,
are there any Are there any that you feel like
you've really you've really moved and moved the dialon throughout
the course of your career.

Speaker 2 (01:39:59):
Of those Yeah, I mean there are a few cognic
biases that, uh, you can sometimes be aware of that,
Oh I'm being anchored. You know, somebody is giving me
that number and that number is affecting my thinking.

Speaker 1 (01:40:18):
Uh.

Speaker 2 (01:40:19):
But by and large, it's very difficult when you are
just making a mistake to become aware that you're making
a mistake. That really doesn't come naturally, certainly doesn't come
naturally to me.

Speaker 1 (01:40:35):
It's an amazing testament to your humility to spend to
win the Nobel Prize over this and to admit that
you still have some of these biases yourself, and it
makes me, inspires me in a way, and it also
makes me feel hopeless as well.

Speaker 2 (01:40:53):
I think the latter is appropriate.

Speaker 1 (01:40:59):
I mean, I've question just about winning the Nobel Prize.
In what way did winning the Nobel Prize increase your
happiness in life?

Speaker 2 (01:41:06):
Oh? You know, in multiple ways. I mean, but I'm
going to tell you something that people don't realize. I mean,
the experience of winning that prize. I mean, the thing
that's most really about that experience is how much pleasure
it gives to other people. So anybody who will likes you,

(01:41:30):
they don't have to like you. Anybody who is connected
to you feel some pleasure. And you know, this is
totally unjustified. I mean, there is no logic behind it
doesn't matter. But the fact is that this is an
association and people in many other domains, many other successes

(01:41:51):
that you have, other people are going to grudge you,
to be grudge you, or there's going to be some envy.
For some reason, the Nobel Prize is not one of them.
At least maybe among your colleagues, but not certainly not
among So that was the major thing during the first year,

(01:42:11):
when I was really conscious of it, with so much pleasure.
This was giving to everybody around me. That that in
itself is sort of great happiness, is that you feel
your sort of people happy. You're making people happy by
something that is happening to you.

Speaker 3 (01:42:29):
That was your mother.

Speaker 1 (01:42:30):
Your mother will tell everyone about it.

Speaker 3 (01:42:32):
Yeah, but Danny, my son, Danny got the Nobel Prize.

Speaker 2 (01:42:38):
You weren't around and but but you know, neighbors would say,
I mean, and so that's part of it. It's really quick.
I hadn't anticipated this, but I'm long traded. But the
initial experience that was very saying. And in general it

(01:42:58):
certainly improves life. Fine, I recommend it to everybody. Uh
it's not uh uh. You know, your credibility increases people people,
and you get more access to resources, but you mainly
and you're taken more seriously than you deserve to be

(01:43:18):
taken a lot of good things happen, and and there
isn't much downside if you don't let it sort of
dominate your life. If you're lively dominate your life, it's
not good.

Speaker 1 (01:43:30):
But you know, well, not only dominate your life. I mean,
to what extent overconfidence could also be a problem. To
what extent did it? Did it increase your confidence? Were
you ever insecure before winning the Nobel Prize? Did it
make you feel more confident?

Speaker 2 (01:43:47):
Oh? Yeah, I mean I think. Uh, I once heard
somebody described the experience of being knighted and uh, and
you had the phrase that really impressed me. He said,
you don't sweat the small stuff. Uh, that's something happens

(01:44:08):
that gives you a different perspective. So it really is
a matter of luck. But when when that thing happens
to you, it really changes your life for the better.
M hmm. It feels quite unfair.

Speaker 1 (01:44:21):
I feel like everyone should be able to win the
Nobel Prize at some point in their life to to
increase their their well being. And yeah, so you know.

Speaker 3 (01:44:32):
What advice?

Speaker 1 (01:44:33):
Okay, Well, this is the question was if you were
if you were just starting out in the field right
now today, you're you're fresh out of grad school, what
topic or area would you be most excited to spend
your career studying.

Speaker 2 (01:44:49):
Oh? I think today I would go either in brain science,
into brain science or into artificial intelligiums. Hmm. That's that's
where I would go because at the moment, that's that's

(01:45:12):
where a lot of exciting things seem to be happening totally.

Speaker 1 (01:45:17):
And there's a whole fascinating literature on bias in algorithms,
and that's a whole other topic. But you know what
I mean, that's if you could apply your work to
that area. What do you see as the next era
of behavioral economics and behavioral science?

Speaker 2 (01:45:36):
I have a rule against foecasting. I just don't believe
people can do it. And you know, I can say
trivial things about what is happening now and which is
likely to remain so over the next four or five years,
but I nobody can predict what happened. And those who

(01:45:59):
tell you they can of just eluding themselves.

Speaker 1 (01:46:02):
Hey, that's an answer in itself. So fair enough, Yeah,
fair enough. I'm sure you get asked this one all
the time. But you know, what do you what do
you think or what do you want your grass legacy
to be?

Speaker 2 (01:46:17):
I I think I don't. Uh, you know, I don't
spend much time thinking about it. Uh. I'm pleased right
now that I think you know, right, now, I think
that I would like the idea of noise to capture
on I would have liked adversarial collaboration to catch I

(01:46:43):
think that the way that we can do controversies is
ridiculous and uh, and something should be done to you
know what we were talking about with that study of
well being, where we're getting somebody is getting different results.
This is really not a way to conduct science. I

(01:47:05):
mean to have somebody in and then no contact. Yeah,
and that happens all the time instead of people saying, oh, look,
I mean I have a result that doesn't seem to
fit yours. Let's let's compare notes, let's see, let's talk.

(01:47:25):
But you get it's very adversarial and I so I
had that idea of adversarial collaboration, and I don't think
it's going to It hasn't had much impact. But I
wish I love that.

Speaker 1 (01:47:41):
I wish I saw that more in Congress for instance.
You know that's a different story, I know, but but
I wish we just saw that in various different aspects
of my life. So do you do you have grandchildren? Yes,
you know, what advice do you give them about, you know, living.

Speaker 3 (01:48:00):
In this world?

Speaker 1 (01:48:01):
Moving forward? In the kind of world we're living in
today in next hundred years, do you have like any
general sort of wisdom?

Speaker 2 (01:48:09):
No, of course not. I mean you know I wouldn't.
I wouldn't there give advice to my grandchildren. I mean,
all right, you know I can give them advice about
how to navigate. Well, that's too at school.

Speaker 1 (01:48:26):
But if that's too broad a question, I can narrow
it and say, what if what about to aspiring psychologists?
You know, what advice do you have too? Young psychologists
are going to the field. Yeah, just general advice for them.

Speaker 2 (01:48:42):
Well, I mean, you know when I I think that
not getting too attached to your ideas is really an
important piece of advice. That you have a lot of
people getting attached from mediocre ideas instead of looking for
better ones. Uh, that's that I think, HM. And being

(01:49:05):
willing to move if things don't work, and not getting stuck.
That would be my advice. But also consider whether this
is the life for you, that is academic life has

(01:49:27):
you know, because it's it's a better is its benefits
and its costs, and it's much more suitable for some
personalities than for others. And it would be good advice
for some people just don't do this because you're not
going to be happy and you're not going to be
as productive as you could be. So that's that I think,

(01:49:51):
you know, I think I wrote that in Thinking Fast
and Slow. But it's that in order to be a
scientist successful scientist, you have to be a to exaggerate
the importance of what you're doing. If you cannot exaggerate
the importance of what you're involved in, you will feel futile.
And you can see that in order to be passionate

(01:50:13):
about what you're doing, you have to think that this
is the most interesting thing in the whole universe. So
at least, I mean, I'm exaggerating now, but you have
to view it as bigger than it really is. And
not everybody has that characteristic, and some people have it
too much, you know.

Speaker 1 (01:50:35):
That's a different story.

Speaker 3 (01:50:38):
Is there a study that you.

Speaker 1 (01:50:41):
Wish you had done and didn't you They're like, wow,
I wish I did this study.

Speaker 2 (01:50:47):
Well, I mean, you know constantly you have that when
I read experiments by other people, you know, when I'm
very impressed.

Speaker 1 (01:50:55):
You know, I wish, but I guess I'm more a
study that hasn't been done yet. But you're like, ohhh,
you know, if I had the resources, if I had.

Speaker 2 (01:51:07):
Oh you know, there must have been I don't remember that.
It's not something that I have stought that I had
that regret about the study I should have done.

Speaker 1 (01:51:15):
And no, So this is my last question, you know,
the evaluation of one's life and their satisfaction. Can you
just give me a you know, just think about your
life and give me just a retrospective reflection on overall?
Have you been happy, satisfied, content, et cetera.

Speaker 2 (01:51:39):
Well, men, you know, I view myself as being extraordinarily lucky.
So I was, you know, I was lucky. I didn't
you know, we spoke about the war that I had
in Europe and so on, but I was lucky. I
survived and I didn't really suffer hunger, torture. So I

(01:52:06):
was lucky then. And I've been lucky all my life.
I've been mainly lucky in the friends I've had and
in the collaborations. So that's that's made my life. All
my work has been social, and I've enjoyed every part
of it. So it's yeah, that's my main evaluation. I've

(01:52:31):
been very fooled.

Speaker 1 (01:52:33):
Thank you so much, Danny, for this wonderful chat today
and for being so inspiring to so many of us
in the field of psychology as well as the broader public.
And your humility, your graciousness, your intellect, and your humanity.
Thank you so much for being on The Psychology Podcast today.

Speaker 2 (01:52:52):
Thank you, Scott. You embarrassed me, but I forgive you.

Speaker 3 (01:52:56):
See you don't stop there? Where did I embarres you?
At what point?

Speaker 1 (01:53:03):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (01:53:04):
Gotcha? Gotcha?

Speaker 1 (01:53:05):
Well, I I hear you. I really do mean it
from the bottom of my heart. So thanks again, Thank you.
Thanks for listening to this episode of The Psychology Podcast.
If you'd like to react in some way to something
you heard, I encourage you to join in the discussion

(01:53:27):
at thus Psychology podcast dot com. We're on our YouTube
page the Psychology Podcast. We also put up some videos
of some episodes on our YouTube page as well, so
you'll want to check that out. Thanks for being such
a great supporter of the show, and tune in next
time for more on the mind, brain, behavior, and creativity.

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