In Defense of Intuition (with Gerd Gigerenzer)

Psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer explains the power of intuition, how intuition became gendered, what he thinks Kahneman and Tversky's research agenda got wrong, and why it's a mistake to place intuition and conscious thinking on opposing ends of the cognition spectrum. Topics he discusses in this wide-ranging conversation with EconTalk's Russ Roberts include what Gigerenzer calls the "bias bias"--the overemphasis on claims of irrationality, why it's better to replace "nudging" with "boosting," and the limitations of AI in its current form as a replacement for human intelligence and intuition.

• 0:02Speaker 00

  Welcome to Econ Talk, Conversations for the Curious, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host, Russ Roberts, of Shalem College in Jerusalem and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Go to econTalk.org, where you can subscribe, comment on this episode, and find links to other information related to today's conversation. You'll also find our archives with every episode we've done going back to 2006. Our email address is [email protected]. We'd love to hear from you. Today is December 4, 2025, and my guest is psychologist and author Gerd Gigerenzer

• 0:43Speaker 00

  of the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. This is Gerd's third appearance on the program. He was last here in August of 2022, discussing artificial intelligence. Our topic for today is his book, "The Intelligence of Intuition." Gerd, welcome back to Econ Talk.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  I'm glad to be here with you again.

• 1:04Speaker 00

  Tell us what you mean by intuition. It's a very imprecise word to some extent, but you mean something a little more precise.

• 1:12Speaker 01

  True. Intuition is a feeling based on years of experience that comes fast into your consciousness. So you feel what you should do or what you shouldn't do. And you have no way to explain it, where it's coming from. So it is not an arbitrary decision. It is not a seventh or sixth sense, depending on how you count the senses. And it's also

• 1:51Speaker 01

  not something that only women have. So everyone has intuition, who has experience with a certain domain or task.

• 2:04Speaker 00

  So you mentioned women. The first part of your book is the, is an intellectual history of how intuition was treated as a woman's expertise as opposed to, say, rationality, or reason, or analytical ability, and that this did, of course, a terrible disservice to women and to our understanding of rationality and intuition.

• 2:29Speaker 01

  That is true. So intuitive 20th century textbooks in psychology were promoting the idea that men's intellect is very different from females intellect. And of course, we men are rational, with reason, while women are intuitive. And an entire dichotomy was there. So intuitive versus rational, associative versus deliberate, and also fast. Women were

• 3:09Speaker 01

  thinking fast. That meant not reliable. We were slow. And, and at the end, if women did something wrong, in many societies, they were not responsible. But the husband was responsible. And interestingly, this dichotomy turned now in the 21st century, distinction between a system one and a system two. System one was the idea about women, system two about men. And to the point that all kind of errors, including the, the difference

• 3:51Speaker 01

  between the research of Kahneman and Tversky, who showed that mostly people err, and my research, who showed that insane task, people get it right, was then reinterpreted by Kahneman. And he says, that was the solution to our debate there, in the terms of system one and system two. So if you do something wrong, it was your system one. If you do it right, it was your system two. And even to the point that system two has to pay attention.

• 4:26Speaker 00

  So you've been defending intuition for quite some time. And I suspect during some of that, it was a little bit lonely. I feel like intuition is having a comeback or its day in the sun. I interviewed David Bessus recently on his book Mathematica, which is really, he really champions intuition. He calls it, he relates it to system one of Kahneman and Fersky. But he, he says, you know, there's system one, which is vision, which helps you see something you wouldn't otherwise see, an insight. And it's visual.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  System two is analytical. And you use system three. You combine the two to figure out, sometimes your vision's wrong. So you check it with system two, but often it's right. And if it's wrong, he talks about using, quote, "system three" to figure out what you need to learn so that the next time you see something, a vision, say in a mathematical proof or a science, that you have a better track record going forward. Then I interviewed Angus Fletcher recently. His book Primal Intelligence is very much a defense of intuition, slightly different interpretation than yours, but in the ballpark. And I'm curious if you think, if I'm right,

• 5:51Speaker 00

  that your feeling about how the world looks at your ideas has changed recently? Or is it no different than it's always been? I feel like there's a newfound respect for intuition and that your work is gonna be respected more than it has been in the past. Am I right?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  I think you're right, yeah. So I wrote a book called Gut Feelings a long time ago. And a few years later, Malcolm, what is his name?

• 6:26Speaker 00

  Gladwell.

• 6:27Speaker 01

  Gladwell, yeah, I'm sorry. Wrote a book where he took up some of my ideas and blink and popularized it. And I think that more and more people are coming clear or being clear that without intuition, we would go nowhere. There would be no intuition, no innovation. And that the war against intuition is totally flawed. And just add one thing. There is no opposition between intuition and conscious thinking.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  That's the big mistake of the System 1 or System 2. Just to give an example, a doctor that knows you well, Russ, and today the doctor thinks something is wrong with you. But the doctor cannot explain her feeling. That is intuition.

• 7:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 7:32Speaker 01

  Based on long year experience, the feeling is there immediately, but the doctor cannot explain it. Now, what does a doctor do? No, diagnostics. So it is totally deliberate. So in that example, the intuition inspired the diagnostic. Without intuition, there would be probably no diagnostics. So there is no contradiction there.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, I love the quote you opened the book with. "We know more than we can tell," which I think is Michael Polanyi. And I have a different translation of the Pascal quote you like. I like to say, "The heart has its reasons that reason does not know." And that is, um, we, our culture mocks that, right? Our culture, well, if you can't explain it, if you can't justify it, you can't tell me, "I'm not going to pay any attention to it because it's not rational." And it's a misunderstanding, I think, of what rational is. And I, I don't want to miss this chance. I, I said, "The world's coming toward in your direction." But it's also the case that it's running away.

• 8:48Speaker 00

  And where it's running away is in the discussion of artificial intelligence, which we talked about the last time, and we can, I want to revisit some of that. There is definitely a belief among many, many people in that, in the field, that artificial intelligence, this, uh, which is very much not intuitive, uh, on the surface at least, is going to solve all our problems. It's going to know things that we can't know because we're not, we don't know, we don't have enough bandwidth and, and our, our memory is not like theirs of artificial intelligence. And I think it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what intelligence is, um, at least at its current level. And do you agree with that?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So there is no method or no technology that can solve all problems. That's a religious faith. It's like God, yeah. "Please, God, help me to solve all my problems. I believe in you." And we have, uh, we just should step back and think about the technologies before that we believed might solve everything. So we had...

• 10:05Speaker 01

  The Human Genome Project, remember that?

• 10:07Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Hmm? And people thought that if we know our entire genome, we can cure cancer, we can cure Alzheimer. We know everything about us. So it's much more complicated.

• 10:25Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  And it's the same with AI. And by the way, those abilities that we have, which are highly unconscious and intuitive, are often the hardest for AI to do. For instance, watch the world soccer champions in robot soccer. It's a comedy. And then you can see how difficult it is for a robot to understand what's going on in a soccer play. So we are far away.

• 11:09Speaker 01

  There are certain things where AI is better than humans. And it's often well-defined rules like chess and Go or industry applications or large language models which work on a corpus of words and the correlations that doesn't change. So these types are easy for AI. But moment, there is uncertainty. There is, uh, yeah, you have to predict the future. It gets difficult. And predictive AI, particularly if it's about humans or about viruses, there's little success.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  But the people in that field, I think overwhelmingly, and there is a religious aspect to it or referred to it a number of times. But I think they feel very strongly that, well, that's today. You know, 20 years ago, you said AI would, not you, but the world said AI will never solve Go, the game of Go. And it did. It's very good at it. It'll never solve chess. There's too many combinations. It's really good at chess. Uh, but. I and you say, "But those are worlds that are well-contained. They're, they're, they have specific rules, those worlds." But it might cure cancer. That'd be great. I'd be thrilled if it could cure cancer. It is more complicated than it appears at, on the surface. The part

• 12:33Speaker 00

  I have trouble with is it'll cure poverty, as if poverty is a technical problem that we just, we know what the solution is, but we just can't implement it, or we can't figure it out. But it will, it'll know how to do it. And I think that is unlikely. I'm very skeptical about those kinds of social problems, or fixed democracy to be even more absurd.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  It seems rather, if anything, the opposite. So the, the, the difference between the poor and the ultra-rich are getting larger. For instance, compared to last year, there was just a report that the billionaires are getting richer and richer and richer, particularly the tech billionaires. And, and just another example, I mean, the energy, the, the, the need for energy of the big, the big tech companies have, that is going totally against

• 13:41Speaker 01

  taking care of climate change.

• 13:48Speaker 00

  But then it'll figure it out. Give it time. All I meant to stress was that there's a techno-optimism, I think, that is relentless. And so when you say things like, "It won't solve this problem, that problem," though, I think the standard response, and it might be right, of course, is, "Well, it'll just take longer than you think. It's just a matter of time." I, I think there are many human problems that are not of that nature. And the, the idea that somehow we haven't solved them because, quote, "We aren't smart enough, but a smarter machine will," I think is a misunderstanding of how the world works, but, you know, maybe I'm wrong.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a common rhetoric. But just take the example of the Human Genome Project again. We have the same rhetoric. Just wait until we have deciphered all the genes. And all of this, we will cure cancer. The problem is that there is so much interaction between genes. There are so many genes which are out of business for some time. And things are not as easy. And if you look behind, why these claims have been made about AI for the last 50 years, overstatements, is in part because of funding. Getting funding from science, getting funding from politicians,

• 15:12Speaker 01

  tell the politicians stories that they believe because they don't read. And so you get the money and then you don't care. And declare everyone who doesn't believe your face is anti-technological. It's the opposite. I mean, the big successes are done by basic fundamental research. Without a Max Planck or an Einstein, there would be no lasers. There would be very little of this technology that's being used today. And but these people are doing promises in order to get their own stories through.

• 15:50Speaker 00

  I just want to add one more thing about AI. I think I'm right on this, but you know, you can correct me or listener can correct me. So I sometimes ask AI to write a biography of me. I'll ask one of the... I subscribe to three or four because I think it's important to understand. And I enjoy it too. It's fun. I get amazingly, amazing use out of it. So I'm not against it in any way. So sometimes I'll ask it to write a biography of me. Because I know I'm pretty good at checking whether it's hallucinating or not. And the last time I did that, it gave me a chair,

• 16:31Speaker 00

  a chair in an economics department at a university I've never taught at. And I never had a chair there either, by the way. And I thought, that's interesting. And now in the new world, they give you the source sometimes. And so I click through and it's... There is a website that has falsely attributed a chair to me that it decided was deserved. And...

• 16:57Speaker 00

  What's weird about AI, at least as I understand it right now, is I can say to it, "Oh, you know, by the way, I don't, Russ Roberts doesn't have a chair at that university." And it goes, "Oh, I'm so sorry." Of course it doesn't. Sometimes it does that because it literally made it up. But either way, when you ask for a biography of Russ Roberts two weeks later, it could make that same mistake again because it does not learn. It does not say, "Oh, I've got to correct that cell in the database now about what, what he did between 1977 and 1982." It just starts from scratch again.

• 17:36Speaker 00

  And so I find it interesting that it has no intuition in the way you said about it. It comes from a long experience. We as human beings, we see certain patterns that we unconsciously come to trust. And you see in a person's face that they're troubled, or the doctor sees you're not feeling well, and they can't explain what it is sometimes, as you, as you point out. But if AI doesn't correct its errors and learn that way, it seems its ability to access that kind of human reasoning is lost.

• 18:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. One should not confuse deep artificial neural networks, that's what it is, with human intelligence. That's the old danger. It is, it is something different that can do some things better than we, and we should use it for that, but we should not fall prey to this religious faith that it can do everything. There's such a desire among humans to have a God, and only one God, who takes care and gives us certainty. Instead of, "Science will develop," and I would bet in 10, 20 years, there will be

• 18:55Speaker 01

  a totally different kind of AI than the, this artificial neural networks type.

• 19:02Speaker 00

  Very possible.

• 19:05Speaker 00

  Let's shift gears. What is, I love this part of the book, what is the bias bias? And it's a...

• 19:14Speaker 00

  It's a critique of an enormous industry, Gerd. There's an immense number of books that come my way and studies that come your way on this topic that you are critical of. So what is the bias bias?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  The bias bias is the misunderstanding. Or put it this way, the bias bias is the temptation to see biases everywhere, even if there are none.

• 19:51Speaker 01

  And that is mostly due to researchers, but also to many people who want to use this to justify their policies, like nudging political paternalism and artificial intelligence paternalism. The argument is people have all these biases, machines can do better, what do you want?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Believe in machines.

• 20:17Speaker 01

  And what we know today is that most of the biases that are presented in the literature in these books that you talk about, like overconfidence, the hot hand fallacy, conjunction error, base rate error.

• 20:33Speaker 00

  Framing.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and framing are no biases at all. They may be biased in a certain situation, but not in others.

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Or even worse, in the case of the hot hand fallacy. So that's the claim that coaches and basketball fans make errors because they believe that the player gets hot for some time. And then allegedly researchers have shown that there is no hot hand. Now we know from a great article in

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Econométrica by Miller and Sanjuro. That it's not that the coaches have a problem with statistical thinking. It's the researchers.

• 21:29Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Who who didn't understand that the properties of a sample are not always the same as the population. So the the I don't want to go into detail. I've written in this book, you find many examples about the bias bias. And in general, anything like overconfidence is good in some situation and bad in others. It's not generally wrong. And base rate neglect is the best thing you can do if your world is changing quickly, but not good if it's fragile. You need to think about this.

• 22:10Speaker 01

  This is what I call ecological rationality, not just logic. And but it has been used and misused for blaming people.

• 22:20Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  Instead of blaming researchers and social scientists kind of lose statistical thinking.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, we had a very, we had a very nice episode with Ben Cohen on on his book, The Hot Hand. And I want to say one thing about The Hot Hand, which it's not an easy thing to measure or test. And people do write about it as if it's just a question of making few calculations. And your point is that finally someone made a an insight that actually sometimes you're making the wrong calculation. But I think what struck me about that debate is that the size of the hot hand, even in the corrected.

• 23:12Speaker 00

  Study that found there actually is a hot hand was quite small, tiny actually. And I think if you ask Steph Curry or other great athletes about the hot hand, they would really laugh at the researchers. And that doesn't mean anything. Obviously, people in a field can misunderstand what they're good at, how well, how good they are at it. But I am a little surprised at how small it is. So if it does exist, at least in the data, it's relatively small. But as you point out in the book, which I, which I loved for a number of reasons, as listeners will appreciate, you know, Gary Becker pointed out to you one time, you mentioned that, yeah, when a guy is hitting shot after shot, you change

• 23:57Speaker 00

  your defense, you change your, your, who you, who covers them in the basketball game. So it's increasingly, it's increasingly, it's increasingly complicated. But when I mentioned earlier that your work wasn't so popular because you're skeptical about reason or rationality, I suspect that a person who calls something the bias bias, who likes to point out that the researchers are more of a problem than the decision makers, I assume that it doesn't lead to getting invited to a lot of the right cocktail parties and conferences. Am I right?

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Depending on how you think, I think that it is, it could be equally a topic of cocktail parties to, to, to just start thinking at cocktail parties. So for instance, take framing. So a famous example is, so you have a severe heart problem, yeah, and your doctor tells you.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  You consider a major surgery and you want to know the prospect. And your doctor can tell you either you have a 90% chance you will survive or you have a 10% chance that you die. According to the framing literature, you should not listen to your doctor. Because it's logically the same. Now, this is the opposite of psychology. We know from experiments by Craig McKenzie, for instance, a nurses, that people convey recommendations.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  And if the doctor says you have a 90% chance to survive, that means do it. If the doctor says 10% chance you die, that's a warning, not a recommendation. Because the doctor knows more about that, that is. And now, and humans are intelligent enough to understand. They can read between the lines. And that's mistaken as a framing bias. Just think about that.

• 26:18Speaker 00

  I'm sure, I'm sure you remember the case of the, I don't remember the researcher, people can look it up. But this person who got enormous number of citations for, in a psychology test of using words related to aging and being old. And that was not the real experiment, but they, they used that, had them do the experiment. But the real experiment was how quickly the people left the room. So the claim was, is that after you heard words like Florida or, I forget what other words were, were relevant. But things related to seniors supposedly, people left the room worse slowly. That was the claim.

• 27:02Speaker 00

  And it did not replicate. It, it, in a larger, it replicated. Many, many people found similar types of framing mattering. But, but when it was done with a large enough sample, it wasn't, it wasn't reliable. Well, the original author, the author of the original study had made the claim. One of his defenses was is that people didn't read the script correctly. Now, I have no idea how he knew that. It was kind of, I thought, a desperation claim to try to salvage his research. But I take, but I'm just thinking about your recent example. You know, if I'm in the, I'm in the doctor's office and I say, you know, I don't know. It's major surgery. Should I, what are your thoughts? I mean, how likely is it to succeed? You know, if he says, well, you know, 90% of the people survive.

• 27:47Speaker 00

  It's pretty, it's pretty good versus, well, you know, about 10% of the people die on the operating table. And if you read the words in the write-up of this experiment that was done, obviously the intonation is not irrelevant. If it's spoken, people convey enormous amounts of information between the lines.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if you're a doctor in the US, then you fear being sued. You better be not to be explicit.

• 28:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, well, that's another, yeah. What's, what's the difference between boosting and nudging? And, you know, speaking of trends, you know, there was a period I felt where nudging was very in vogue. I don't care as much about it as I used to. I'm not sure whether that's just random or not, but you're a bigger fan of boosting over nudging. So talk about why nudging bothers you. A lot of people think it's great. And what's, what's, what's boosting and what's the difference?

• 28:53Speaker 01

  Okay. So the term nudging is from Thaler and Sonstein's book, Nudge. And it's based on the research of Kahneman and Tversky. To make it very simple, the argument is people do not know how to deal with risks. Second, they cannot learn. The biasing doesn't work. And third, therefore, because that has immense consequences for our lives, government needs to step in and nudge people.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Towards the direction where there would be anyhow if there could reason, yeah, rationally. So that's basically, it's a justification for paternalism in the 21st century. So my research has shown, yes, people often don't understand risk. If you present them in a way that I've never learned, like conditional probabilities. If you present them in frequencies, they understand. Okay. On the second assumption that people cannot learn, that's the evidence is totally different. We can teach.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  Already, we have now made it, we have second class. So seven to eight year olds can understand Bayesian thinking.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  If you present the information in an intuitive way. And we have shown that with children in Germany, with children in China.

• 30:39Speaker 01

  And on the third issue, so that you want to deal with people not by educating them, because they allegedly, there's no hope. But by nudging them, I think that is for me an anti-democratic move. Democracy works only if people understand and are willing to take their part. And if you want to have a new autocracy of a few

• 31:16Speaker 01

  decision, the masters that tell us what to do, where do we get?

• 31:23Speaker 01

  And this is a similar movement towards replacing, no longer betting into people and making people strong, but replacing them by some algorithm or by some, yeah, political actor. So from my own research, the term boosting came out, that has Ralph Hertwig has formalized that, one of my former postdocs. And boosting means that you make people strong.

• 32:00Speaker 01

  You don't nurture them like sheep. You make them stronger. And they can start already in schools. Make them risk literacy. And that should continue in journalism. Rather than going and, for instance, or in the parties that you mentioned, your cocktail parties, rather than telling stupid stories about how dumb everyone else is and laugh. Why don't you tell a few stories? How to understand things? How to understand what a positive test? You have a positive COVID test.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  Does it mean that you have COVID? No. What's the chance? Figure it out. So useful things. And we know from when we teach children what it means, for instance,

• 32:57Speaker 01

  you hear in the weather report or online that there's a 30% chance of rain tomorrow. What does it mean? Adults don't know, Mois, yeah? Some think it means, oh, so I live in Berlin. Most Berliners think it means that it will rain tomorrow in 30% of the time, that is seven to eight hours. Others think it will rain tomorrow in 30% of the region, so probably not where I live. And the majority opinion in a study we did with a representative group in Spain, Spaniards think something different.

• 33:40Speaker 01

  A 30% chance of rain means that three meteorologists think it rains and seven not. What meteorologists really, really want to say is that, given the constellation of today, that it will rain in 30% of the days.

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Did I like tomorrow? So most likely not. Now, the point is, this example is very easy to understand. And the general principle always ask for the reference class. So is the 30% about time or region or days or meteorologists? And children by age 10 can easily understand that. And they can proudly go home and ask their daddy, what do you mean it mean 30% chains of rain? And that is part of boosting.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  And it makes it's fun.

• 34:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's great.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  And it makes people strong and interested to learn something about the world rather than to be a mere consumer of the latest TikTok.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  So, you know, I've never thought about it, but nudge is such a brilliant marketing term for this project. Cause it's so modest. I'm not going to shove you into one class or another or into some decision. I'm not going to even push you. I'm just going to give you just a nudge, which sounds modest. You could call it manipulate instead of nudge.

• 35:32Speaker 00

  You give an amazing example in the book, which I've never heard. Yeah, I'm a big consumer of this kind of stuff. And I, like you, you know, a famous example of nudging is is opting in versus opting out. So if on your driver's license, if you want to donate body organs, if you were to be killed in a car accident. You have a choice, the state, the government has a choice. They can say, "Well, everybody has to donate their organs, but of course you're free, because we believe in freedom, to opt out." So you can choose to say, "I'm not, I don't want to do this, it'll be on your driver's license."

• 36:13Speaker 00

  Versus, well, no one should have to give an organ without a free choice. So if you'd like to donate one, this is opting in, you can choose to do so. And so, one of the proofs of the power of nudge, whether it's a good idea or not, and of course, you in the book point out, I've, we've talked about it many times in the past, when it was a more contentious issue in public policy. Obviously, the people who are designing the nudges are not saints. There's political influence. I really don't, you talk about democracy. I don't think it's good for democracy to give this power, even if it's somewhat limited and there's still freedom to influence people if it actually works. But this case, I mean, who doesn't want more organs?

• 36:56Speaker 00

  We have a kidney shortage everywhere in the world, almost. So please, the implication of this is that, excuse me, the finding on this is that when you have people opt out, have to opt out, most people will just go along with it. They won't opt out. Versus opting in, not so many opt in. So the result is, if you have opt out, you get a lot more kidneys and a lot more other organs, and opting in is just feeble. But you point out it doesn't work out that way, which is fascinating and obvious, and I'm ashamed I never thought about it. Explain what's going on there.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Okay. If everyone is an organ donor, except those who opt out, you have more organ donors than if it's the other way around. Yeah. But you have only more potential organ donors. Potential, yeah. What you want are real organ donors. And there is much more to do than just having an opt in or opt out policy. So, there are two studies out now. One has looked at 35 OECD countries. About half of them have an opt in, half of them have an opt out policy,

• 38:16Speaker 01

  and have looked at the actual organ donations, not the potential. The potentials are very different.

• 38:24Speaker 01

  And the actual...

• 38:25Speaker 00

  Now, before you go on, when I first read this in your book, I thought, "What? You mean you're telling me that after the person gets killed in the car crash, they say, 'I changed my mind'? That's a macabre, dark way of making this distinction, but that's not what happens. Why is there a difference? Why should there be a difference in potential and actual? I mean, they've accepted it. It's on the driver's license.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  Yeah. Just assume, or put it this way. So if there's a motorbike accident, which is a typical situation, and the person is dying.

• 39:04Speaker 01

  Now, what you need is you need to get this person to a hospital. And you need to get this person to a hospital in time. And the hospital needs to have a room prepared and the personnel and to make the operation, the surgery, and they need to have this coordinated so that the person who gets the organ is also there. So there's a huge body of organization being done. And moreover, the hospitals need to have financial incentives

• 39:43Speaker 01

  that they keep these, the surgery room and also this equipment in place. And if you don't have that, then potential organ donors don't help you. And Spain is the country who has the best organization

• 40:06Speaker 01

  and has the highest number or proportion of actual organ donations. Spain had began with that, the policy of opt-out, and it didn't work.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  And only when they started to organize the system so that it's fast. And for instance, the psychological part is not...

• 40:39Speaker 01

  Presenting the default, but talking with the parents or the relatives. And because at the end, it's not the opt in or opt out default, but it's usually the relatives who decide. And so to make it short, the problem is much bigger than a default. And the two big studies that have been out, the one the OECD studies and the second one done at the Max Bank Institute for Human Development, where I am, had looked at countries that actually

• 41:23Speaker 01

  switched from everyone is not a donor except the person opts in to everyone is a donor except the person opts out. I have looked, what happens? The number of potential donors increases, yes, but the number of actual donors did not increase. And the reason is simple, because the system is not being changed.

• 41:51Speaker 00

  It's a fascinating example, because it's a form of virtue signaling. Everybody feels good when the potential donor group goes up, the number of people who put this notation on this driver license when they when they sign up, say. And it actually, it fools you into thinking you've done something. And your point is, is that actually, that's not the hard problem. The hard problem is getting the system mobilized to actually collect a kidney, not to get the agreement of the person. That's much more productive, rather than saying an advertising campaign on, say, getting people to opt in or out. You know, there's an example you give in the book, which I think kind of highlights the

• 42:33Speaker 00

  political challenge, the democracy challenge, the paternalism, treating people like adults, as opposed to treating people like adults. And it comes up with screening. And we've had a number of people on the program talking about how so many, many medical tests that and screenings are not just not as productive as you'd think, but counterproductive. They actually end up with more deaths because of false positives. They create anxiety. And you quote a politician saying, quote, "We can't show this to the public, these results that are discouraging. They would not have cancer screening anymore."

• 43:16Speaker 00

  Well, yeah. And then another example, you give a policymaker raised his hand and said, talking about boosting versus nudging, said, "Well, why inform if we can persuade?" Well, because you can make mistakes and you can fool yourself into thinking you're doing something that you're not. And, you know, it's a nice example.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll back on the topic of paternalism.

• 43:37Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And cancer screening is a good example. And in particular, mammography screening. So I see women in different countries react very differently to it. But almost all are not informed about the scientific evidence. To make it short, if you ask, does mammography screening, and screening is for people who do not have any symptoms, does mammography

• 44:13Speaker 01

  screening prolong your life? And if so, how long? The answer is from randomized studies, randomized trials, the best thing we have. And the answer is mammography screening prolongs life by zero days.

• 44:42Speaker 01

  Zero.

• 44:43Speaker 00

  And that's on average, obviously.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:45Speaker 00

  It would depend on what age you are, when you get the screening, what the policy of the country is, what your personal history is. This is not a show about medical advice, but it's illustrative of an important point. Carry on.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  But women are deceived into that. So this information is not passed on. You find this in the last large review in JAMA. And women are told there is a 20% reduction of breast cancer mortality. And that's.

• 45:22Speaker 00

  If they get mammogram.

• 45:26Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. And that's a form of nudging. So here's, you assume that women do not know the difference between a relative and absolute risk. So you communicate that in relative risk because it looks different and, huh, they believe it's a big effect. So the studies show that out of every 1,000 women aged 50 and older who participate in screening, four die after about 10 years of breast cancer. And out of 1,000 who don't participate, it's five. So there is one in 1,000, from five to four in 1,000. That is 0.1%.

• 46:10Speaker 01

  That is not impressive, isn't it? So you communicate that effect as a 20% reduction instead of point zero.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  From five to four.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Of course, also 20%, huh? And then that's only half of the truth. Because in the screening group, another woman dies from another cancer. This is why at the end, there's no difference. And that's not communicated. And for the reasons that you just mentioned, it would destroy a billion-dollar business.

• 46:44Speaker 01

  Rather nudge women into screening.

• 46:47Speaker 00

  But there are many good intentioned people, I think, who would argue. And I understand the argument, and I sympathize with it, though I do not agree with it, which is better safe than sorry, would be the argument. It's true, it's a small change, but it's still something. You know, in my view of it is, it creates a lot of anxiety, the false positives that you get into the clutches of the industry, of the healthcare industry, and a set of tests go on and on and on. And some people, for peace of mind, will always opt for more tests and more surgery because they would rather be proactive than reactive, and that's part of the human condition also.

• 47:30Speaker 00

  So I don't want to minimize that, but, and we'll link to some of the episodes we've done on this with Fani Prasad and others.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  Just to say this, given what's communicated to women, this one in thousand or 20%, it looks like there is something small. But notice that the, what is withheld, that there's also one in thousand genes.

• 47:57Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  That by screening, you die from another cancer.

• 48:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  And so there's totally nothing to be gained, only the harms, and we are not talking about the harms. And if you want to win the war against cancer, it is not screening, it is prevention. About half of all cancers are due to behavior, and we should start early to, so behavior is smoking, eating too much, and the wrong things, and not moving, and that is really the target. But then we have the tobacco industry, we have the fast food industry, the sugar industry, and all of those who don't want to have this prevention.

• 48:44Speaker 00

  I'm gonna ask you a tough question.

• 48:48Speaker 00

  When I read your books, I think, and we did an episode on gut feelings, by the way, which I recommend. We'll put a link to it. I love that book. And I love this book. I love your work, but I have a bias toward good giga answer. I love that you shatter many of the illusions and claims of people who are on the other side. I love that you point out that things that look irrational actually are rational. The heuristics that we use in all kinds of ways in many parts of life. And I just wonder if you try, I don't try so hard, but I can justify that by saying it's not my life. It's just my hobby.

• 49:34Speaker 00

  Do you find yourself looking for ways to check your own biases? You know, you become very identified with a particular viewpoint. You might be wrong, and I'm sure that your identification with that viewpoint makes it harder for you to consume things that don't always agree with you. So do you ever feel that unease?

• 50:01Speaker 01

  I mean, that is the business of doing science, that you revise your ideas.

• 50:06Speaker 00

  It's hard to do, though, science.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  I must say, I learn all the time. And my research group at the Max Flank Institute is deliberately not, has never been a group of, so it's typically was about 30 to 35 researchers. And they're not been, and they're from about a dozen different disciplines.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  And it's deliberate, so that there's always someone who knows more about something that I know, and there's always someone from whom I can learn. And what is also very important for designing, so at the end of the book, The Intelligence of Intuition, I talk about how to design smart rules for a research group. And one of the most important rules is hire a contrarian. That is, a person who respectfully disagrees with you as the boss, or with the group spirit,

• 51:17Speaker 01

  and a person who has no fear to disagree on factual basis. And this is immensely important to correct my own or the group's biases, and everyone has some preferences about things. So if Putin would have a contrarian or Trump, that would be progress.

• 51:37Speaker 00

  Maybe they do, but they just aren't that good at it, or whatever, who knows? Yeah, the line I should have invoked in asking that question was the Feynman line, "The first principle is you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool."

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:55Speaker 00

  And I know that about myself, so it's kind of always a challenge, I think. But the contrarian's a good idea. Could just be your spouse. You know, I float many ideas by my wife who tells me I'm wrong, which is glorious, because she's not afraid to tell me I'm wrong, and I can learn if I'm lucky.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  And I, same for my wife. She takes no prisoners.

• 52:22Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 52:23Speaker 01

  And I mean, the best friend is not someone who claps you on the shoulder and nods and finds everything good, like ChatGPT-5. So psychopathic, I can't stand it. The best friend is someone who criticizes your ideas if there's something not right, and protects you, running into a knife outside.

• 52:50Speaker 00

  That's awesome. I haven't quoted it in a while, but one of my favorite songs is "It Had to Be You." And in that song...

• 53:05Speaker 00

  There's a verse. "Some others I've seen might never be mean, might never be cross or try to be boss, but they wouldn't do. For nobody else gave me a thrill. With all your faults, I love you still. It had to be you, wonderful you. It had to be you." The music's Isham Jones and the lyrics, Gus Khan. It's a glorious song. I want to close and talk about morality, which you talk about in the book at some length. And there are many things that we do and don't do because we have intuition about them. Not because our parents taught us right from wrong, not because our religious beliefs are such,

• 53:48Speaker 00

  not that we have a Kantian moral imperative, categorical imperative, that we think, "Well, if I did this and everyone did it, then maybe it would be bad." Many of the things we do are gut, quick, based on experience, based on a lifetime. And who knows, could even be hardwired. But what's your perspective on the role of intuition and morality?

• 54:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, let's start. How do children learn what's right and wrong? What we know from the studies is that children are made to focus on this issue, what's right and wrong, as opposed to if it's an issue about what's a descriptive issue, what's in the world and what's it not in the world. And it is very clear that depending on the culture in which, or the parents, in which a child grows up, it will take over the moral rules. Sometimes it's being said,

• 55:01Speaker 01

  but most of the time, it's implicit to this intuitive.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  And the the reason later is basically used to defend what one doesn't know explicitly, but feels. So for many philosophers,

• 55:24Speaker 01

  moral reasoning is

• 55:29Speaker 01

  the how it should be. But on the other hand, for Darwin, for instance, the the reason why people have morals and religions are to bond a group together, to make it stronger, to survive it in our past against other animals and, most important, other people

• 55:52Speaker 01

  who were fighting there. And so the building the group spirit through moral rules, through religion, has an evolutionary function. And now we can debate how important this is today. But in in times where science is under attack, as now, in many countries,

• 56:17Speaker 01

  I see that when scientists stand up for the values, this will be

• 56:26Speaker 01

  much more effective than what I often see today. That people are more timid, that people think about themselves as opposed of a community. So to moral moral behavior is mostly true, as you say, through intuitive rules that are not explicit, that people follow, and often then defend of the fact with with conscious reasoning. But that has a function. And the function is

• 57:05Speaker 01

  best captured by saying, humans are a social species, and something needs to clue us together to survive. And the something is moral fabric, including religious fabric, including similar things. And we should not look down at these values that bond us together.

• 57:31Speaker 00

  My guest today has been Gerd Gigerenzer. His book is The Intelligence of Intuition. Gerd, thanks for being part of Econ Talk.

• 57:40Speaker 01

  It was a pleasure to talk with you again.

• 57:49Speaker 00

  This is Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. For more Econ Talk, go to EconTalk.org, where you can also comment on today's podcast and find links and readings related to today's conversation. The sound engineer for Econ Talk is Rich Goyette. I'm your host, Russ Roberts. Thanks for listening. Talk to you on Monday.