#150 — The Map of Misunderstanding (From the Archive)

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

• 0:02Speaker 00

  You're listening to Making Sense with Sam Harris. This is the free version of the podcast, so you'll only hear the first part of today's conversation. If you want the full episode and every episode, you can subscribe at samharris.org. There are no ads on this show. It runs entirely on subscriber support. If you enjoy what we're doing here and find it valuable, please consider subscribing today. Welcome to the Making Sense podcast. I'm Kirby Ferguson, producer here at the show. Sam is on vacation this week, so we are reaching into the archive and bringing back one of our favorite episodes. This is Sam's conversation with the Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who passed in 2024. It's a timeless conversation and actually one of our funnier episodes. If you've heard it before, it rewards a second

• 0:46Speaker 00

  listen. Sam will be back next week with a new episode. For now, enjoy the map of misunderstanding.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, today I'm bringing you the audio from my live event with Danny Kahneman at the Beacon Theater in New York. This was a sold out event in a very cool old theater. I'd actually never been to the Beacon before, but it has a storied history in music and comedy. Anyway, it was a great pleasure to share the stage with Danny. Daniel Kahneman, as you may know, is an emeritus professor of psychology at Princeton University and also an emeritus professor of public affairs at Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for the work he did on decision making under uncertainty with Amos Tversky. Unfortunately, Tversky

• 1:42Speaker 01

  died in 1996, and he was a legendary figure who would have certainly shared the Nobel Prize with Danny had he lived longer. They don't give the Nobel posthumously. In any case, I think it's uncontroversial to say that Danny has been the most influential living psychologist for many years now, but he's perhaps best known in the general public for his book Thinking Fast and Slow, which summarizes much of the work he did with Tversky. Michael Lewis also recently wrote a biography of the Kahneman-Tversky collaboration, and that is called The Undoing Project. Anyway, Danny and I covered a lot of ground at the

• 2:23Speaker 01

  Beacon. We discussed the replication crisis in science, Systems 1 and 2, which is to say automatic and unconscious cognitive processes and more conscious and deliberative ones. We talked about the failure of intuition, even expert intuitions, the power of framing, moral illusions, anticipated regret, the asymmetry between threats and opportunities, the utility of worrying, removing obstacles to wanted behaviors, the remembering self versus the experiencing self, improving the quality of gossip, and many other topics.

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Anyway, Danny has a fascinating mind, and I think you'll find this a very good introduction to his thinking. Of course, if you want more, his book Thinking Fast and Slow also awaits you if you haven't read it. And now I bring you Daniel Kahneman.

• 3:35Speaker 01

  Well, well, thank you all for coming. Really, an honor to be here. It's a Danny, it's a special honor to be here with you. So thank you for coming.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  My pleasure.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  It is, it's, it's often said and rarely true that a guest needs no introduction, but in your case, that is virtually true. But we're going to talk about your work throughout. So people will, if they, if the, for the one person who doesn't know who you are, you will understand at the, at the end of the hour. But I guess by way of introduction, I just want to ask, but what, what is the worst thing about winning the Nobel Prize?

• 4:15Speaker 02

  That's a hard question, actually. There were many downsides to it.

• 4:22Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, nobody wants to hear your problems, Dan.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  So how would you, how do you think about your body of work? How do you summarize the intellectual problems you have tried to get your hands around?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  You know, it's been just a series of problems that occurred that I worked on. There was no big program. When you look back, of course, I mean, you see patterns and you see ideas that have been with you for a long time, but there was really no plan. I was, you know, you follow, you follow things, you follow ideas, you follow things that you take fancy to. Really, that's a story of my intellectual life. It's just one thing after another.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Judging from the outside, it seems to me that you have told us much of what we now think we know about cognitive bias and cognitive illusion. And really, the, the picture is, is of human ignorance having a kind of structure. It's not just that we get things wrong. We get things reliably wrong. And because of that, whole groups, markets, society is going to get things wrong because the, the errors don't cancel themselves out. I mean, bias becomes systematic. And that obviously has implications that are, that touch more or less everything we care about. Let's just, I want to track through

• 5:48Speaker 01

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

• 6:31Speaker 01

  most celebrated studies in psychology, their reproducibility is on the order of 50, 60% in the best case. So there was one study done in, that took 21 papers from Nature and Science, which are the most highly regarded journals, and reproduced only 13 of them. And so I, just let's, let's talk about the problem we faced in even doing science in the first place.

• 6:58Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you know, the, the key problem and the reason that this happens is that research is expensive. And it's expensive personally, and it's expensive in terms of money. And so you want it to succeed. So when you're a researcher, you know what you want to find. And that creates biases that you're not fully aware of. And I think a lot of this is simply self-delusion. That is, you know, there is a concept that's known as B-hacking, which is people very honestly deluding themselves about what they find. And there are several tricks of the trade that, you know, people know about them. You

• 7:40Speaker 02

  are going to do an experiment. So instead of having one dependent variable where you predict the outcome, you take two dependent variables. And then if one of them doesn't work, you stay with the one that doesn't work.

• 7:52Speaker 01

  Fair.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  You does. You do that and things like that a few times, then it's almost guarantees that your research will not be replicable. And that happens, it was first discovered in medicine. I mean, it's more important in medicine than it is in psychology, where somebody famously said that most published research in medicine is false. And a fair amount of published psychological research is false, too.

• 8:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, even some of the, the most celebrated results in psychology, like, like priming and the marshmallow test and.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Well, in the, yeah. I mean, it's not only, it's actually, they get celebrated in part because, because they are surprising.

• 8:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:36Speaker 02

  And the rule is, you know, the more surprising the result is, the less likely it is to be true. So that's how celebrated results get to be non-replicable.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Right. Well, and the scariest thing I heard, I don't know how robust this study was, but someone did a study on trying to replicate unpublished studies and found that they replicated better than published studies. Did you hear this?

• 9:01Speaker 02

  I don't think that's replicable.

• 9:03Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Let's hope not. Let's talk about System 1 and 2. These are the structures that give us so much of our, what can be a dispiriting picture of human rationality. Summarize for us, what, what are these two systems you, you talk about?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  I mean, before starting with anything else, there are clearly two ways that ideas come to mind. I mean, so if I say two plus two, then an idea comes to your mind, you haven't asked for it. It's, you're completely passive, basically. Something happens in your memory. If I ask you to multiply, you know, 24 by 17 or something like that, you have to work to get that idea. So it's that dichotomy between the associative effortless and the effortful. And that is phenomenologically obvious. You start from there.

• 9:56Speaker 02

  And how you describe it and whether you choose to describe it in terms of systems as I did or in other terms, that's already a theoretical choice. And in my view, theory is less important than the basic observation of, you know, that there are two ways for ideas to come to mind. And then you have to describe it in a way that will be useful. And what I mean by that is you have to describe the phenomena in a way that that will cause, help researchers have good ideas about facts and about experiments to run. And the system one and system two was, it's not my, not my dichotomy and even not my terminology.

• 10:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  And in fact, it's a terminology that many people object to, but I chose it quite deliberately.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  What are the liabilities? Because people, in your book, you try to guard against various misunderstandings of this picture.

• 10:54Speaker 02

  Well, yes. I mean, you know, there is a rule that you're taught fairly early in psychology, which is never to invoke what is called homunculi, which are little people in your head, whose behavior explain your behavior or explain the behavior of people. That's a no-no. And system one and system two are really homunculi. So I knew what I was doing when I, when I picked those. But the reason I did was that system one and system two are agents. They have personalities. And it turns out that the mind is very good at forming pictures and images of agents that have intentions and propensities and

• 11:35Speaker 02

  traits and, and they're active. And it's just easy to get your mind around that. And that's why I picked that terminology, which many people find sort of objectionable because they're really not agents in the head. It's just a very useful way to think about it, I think.

• 11:53Speaker 01

  So there's no analogy to be drawn between the, a classical, psychological, even Freudian picture of the conscious and the unconscious. How do, how do you think about consciousness and everything that precedes it in light of?

• 12:07Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, it's clearly related in the sense that what, what I call system one activities, the automatic ones, one characteristic they have is that you're completely unconscious of the process that produces them. You just get, you know, you get the results. You get four when you hear two plus two.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:26Speaker 02

  In system two activities, you're often conscious of the process. You know what you're doing when you're calculating. You know what you're doing when you're searching for something in memory. So clearly, consciousness and system two tend to go together. It's not a perfect, you know, and who knows what consciousness is anyway, but they tend to go together. And system one is much more likely to be unconscious and automatic.

• 12:53Speaker 01

  Neither system is a perfect guide toward tracking reality, but system one is, is very effective in many cases. Otherwise, we, it wouldn't have evolved the way it has. But I guess maybe let's start with a picture of where our intuitions are reliable and where they reliably fail. How do, how do you think about the utility of intuition?

• 13:15Speaker 02

  I'll say first about system one, that our representation of the world, most of what we know about the world is in system one. We're not aware of it. So that we're going along in life with producing expectations or being surprised or not being surprised by what happens. All of this is automatic. We're not aware of it. So most of our thinking, system one thinking, most of what goes on in our mind goes on and we're not aware of it. So that's, and intuition is defined as, you know, knowing or rather thinking that you know something without knowing why, why you know it, or without knowing where it

• 13:55Speaker 02

  comes from. And it's fairly clear, actually, I mean, that's a digression, but there is a guy named Gary Klein, a psychologist, who really doesn't like anything that I do. And he, he

• 14:08Speaker 01

  How does your, how does your system one feel about that?

• 14:12Speaker 02

  I like Gary a lot, actually. So, but he believes in intuition and in expert intuition. And he's a great believer in, and he has beautiful data showing, beautiful observations of expert intuition. So he and I, I invited him actually to try and figure out our differences because obviously I'm a skeptic. So where intuition marvelous and where is it flawed? And we worked about, we worked for six years before we came up with something and we published an article called The Failure to Disagree, because in fact, there is a fairly clear boundary about when you can trust your intuitions and when you can't. And I think that summarized

• 14:55Speaker 02

  in three conditions. The first one is, the world has to be regular enough. I mean, first of all, intuition is recognition. And that's, Herbert Simon said that. You have an intuition, it's just like recognizing, you know, that it's like a child recognizing what a dog is. It's, it's immediate. Now, in order to recognize patterns and reality, which is what true intuitions are, the world has to be regular enough so that there are regularities to be picked up. Then you have to have enough exposure to those regularities to have a chance to learn them. And third, it turns out that intuition depends critically on

• 15:38Speaker 02

  the time between when you're making a guess and a judgment and when you get feedback about it. The feedback has to be rapid. And if those three conditions are satisfied, then eventually people develop intuition. So that the chess players, chess is a prime example where all three conditions are satisfied. So after, you know, many hours, I don't know 10,000 or not, but many hours, a chess player will have intuitions. All the ideas, all the moves that come to his or her mind are going to be strong moves. That's intuition.

• 16:13Speaker 01

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

• 16:56Speaker 02

  I mean, I think that what happens is that when those conditions are not satisfied, people have intuitions too. That is, you know, they have ideas that come to their mind with high confidence and they think they're right. And so the

• 17:11Speaker 01

  I've, I've, I've met these people.

• 17:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, you know, we've all met them and we see them in the mirror and, you know, that's, so the, it turns out you can have intuitions for bad reasons, you know. So it, all it takes is a thought that comes to your mind automatically and with high confidence. And you'll think that it's an intuition and you'll trust it. And, but the correlation between confidence and accuracy is not high. That's, you know, one of the saddest things about the human condition. You can be very confident in some, in ideas and the correlation. You shouldn't trust your confidence.

• 17:51Speaker 01

  Well, so, but that, so that's just, you know, yes, a depressing but fascinating fact, that the signature of a high probability that you are correct is what you feel while uttering that sentence. I mean, psychologically, confidence is the marker of your credence in whatever proposition it is you're, you're entertaining. And yet, we know they can become totally uncoupled and often are uncoupled. Given what you know or think you know scientifically, well, how much of that bleeds back into your life and changes your epistemic attitude? You know, like, yeah, do you

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Mine personally.

• 18:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Do you, do you hedge your bet? How, how is Danny Kahneman different, given what he has understood about science?

• 18:36Speaker 02

  Not at all.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Not at all?

• 18:37Speaker 02

  I mean,

• 18:37Speaker 01

  Well, this is even more depressing than I thought.

• 18:41Speaker 02

  You know, in terms of, you know, my intuitions being better than they were, no. And furthermore, I have to confess, I'm also very overconfident. So even that I haven't learned.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 18:55Speaker 02

  So it's hard to get rid of those things.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  You're just issuing a long string of apologies? I mean, how do you get through life? Because you should know better. If anyone should know better, you should know better.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I don't really feel guilty about it. So I have to...

• 19:10Speaker 01

  So how hopeful are you that we can improve? How hopeful are you that an individual can improve? And how hopeful are you that we can design systems of conversation and incentives that can make some future generation find us more or less unrecognizable in our stupidity and self-deception?

• 19:31Speaker 02

  Well, you know, I should preface by saying that I'm not an optimist in general, but I'm certainly not an optimist about those questions. I don't think that, you know, I'm a case study because I've been studying that stuff for more than 50 years, and I don't think that my intuitions have really significantly improved. I can catch sometimes, and that's important, I can catch, recognize a situation as one in which I'm likely to be making a mistake. And this is the way that people protect themselves against visual illusions. You can see the illusions, and there's no way you can not see it. But you can recognize that this is likely to be an illusion, so don't trust my eyes, take out the ruler.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  There is an equivalent. You know, there is a similar thing goes on with cognitive illusions. Sometimes you know that your intuitions, your confident thought is unlikely to be true. That's quite rare. It doesn't happen a lot. I don't think that I've become, you know, in any significant way smarter because of studying errors of cognition.

• 20:40Speaker 01

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

• 21:23Speaker 01

  And the delta there is extraordinarily consequential. So if I told you that we, over the course of the next 30 years, made astonishing progress on this front, right? So that we, our generation, looks like, you know, bumbling medieval characters compared to what our children or grandchildren begin to see as a new norm, how did we get there?

• 21:50Speaker 02

  You don't get there. You know, I mean, that's, you know, it's the same as if you told me, will our perceptual system be very different in 60 years? And I don't think so.

• 22:01Speaker 01

  So let's take one of these biases or sources of bias that you have found. I mean, the power of framing, right? We know that if you frame a problem in terms of loss, or you frame the same problem in terms of gains, you get a very different set of preferences from people because people are so averse to loss. So the knowledge of that fact, let's say you're a surgeon, right? And you're recommending or at least, you know, proffering a surgery for a condition to your patients, who you have a, you know, you have taken a Hippocratic oath to do no harm, and you know, because you read Danny Kahneman's book, that if you put the possibility of outcome in terms of mortality rates versus survival rates, you are going to be moving

• 22:44Speaker 01

  several dials in your patient's head, one way or the other, reliably. Can you conceive of us ever agreeing that there's a right answer there, like, in terms of what is the ethical duty to frame this correctly? Is there a correct framing? Or are we just going to keep rolling the dice?

• 23:00Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, this is a lot of questions at once. In the first place, you know, when you're talking about framing, the person who is subject to the framing, and so you had a surgeon framing something for a patient. First of all, the patient is going to be completely unaware of the fact that there is an alternative frame. That's why it works. It works because you see one thing and you accept the formulation as it is given. So that's why framing works. Now, whether there is a true or not true answer, so I should, let me mention the sort

• 23:41Speaker 02

  of the canonical problem, which actually my late colleague Emes Sersky invented. So in one formulation, you have a choice between, well, there is a disease that's going to cause 600 deaths unless something is done, and you have your choice between saving 400 people or two-thirds probability of saving 600. Or alternatively, other people get the other framing, that you have a choice between...

• 24:11Speaker 01

  Killing 200 people.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Killing 200 people for sure, and not allowing them to die, and a one-third probability that 600 people will die. Is there a correct answer? Is there a correct frame? Now, the interesting thing is, people, depending on which frame you presented to them, they make very different choices.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  But now, you confront them with the fact that here you've been inconsistent. And some people will deny it, but, you know, you can convince them, this is really the same problem, you know? If you save 400, then 200 will die. And then what happens is they're dumbfounded. That is, there are no intuitions. We have clear intuitions about what to do with gains. We have clear intuitions about what to do with losses. And when you strip it from that language with which we have intuition, we have no idea what to do. So, you know, what is better when you stop to think about, you know, stop thinking about saving or about dying?

• 25:20Speaker 01

  Well, actually, I've forgotten, if that research was ever done, I forgot what the results were. Has the third condition been compared to the first two? What do people do when you give them both framings and dumbfound them? I mean, where do the percentages go with respect to...

• 25:35Speaker 02

  This is not something that, you know, we've done formally, but I can tell you that I'm dumbfounded. That is, I have absolutely no idea, you know, I have the same intuitions as everybody else, you know? When it's in the gains, I want to save lives. And when it's in the losses, I don't want people to die, so... But that's where the intuitions are. When you're talking to me about 600 more people staying alive with a probability two-thirds, or, you know, when you're talking about numbers of people living, I have absolutely no intuitions about that. So that is quite common in ethical problems and in moral problems, that they're frame-dependent.

• 26:15Speaker 02

  And when you strip the frames away, people are left without a moral intuition.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Boy, and this is incredibly consequential in, when you're thinking about human suffering. So your colleague Paul Slovic has done these brilliant experiments where he's shown that if you ask people to support a charity, you talk about, you know, famine in Africa, say, and you show them one little girl attached to a very salient and heartbreaking narrative about, you know, how much she's suffering, you get the maximum charitable response. But then you go to another group and you show that same one little girl and tell her story, but you give her a brother, and the response diminishes. And if you go to another group and you give them the little girl and her brother, and

• 27:01Speaker 01

  then you say, in addition to the suffering of these two gorgeous kids, there are 500,000 suffering children behind them, suffering the same famine, then the altruistic response goes to the floor. It's precisely the opposite of what we understand system two should be normative, right? The bigger the problem, the more concerned and charitable we should be. So to take that case, there has to, there's a way to correct for this at the level of tax codes and levels of foreign aid and which problems to target. We know that we are emotionally gamed by the salient personal story and more or less

• 27:43Speaker 01

  morally blind to statistics and raw numbers. I mean, there's another piece of work that you did, which shows that people are so innumerate with respect to the magnitude of problems, that they will more or less pay the same amount, whether they're saving 2,000 lives, 20,000 lives, or 200,000 lives.

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Yeah. Because basically, and that's a system one characteristic, basically you're saving one life. You're thinking, you have an image, you have stories, and this is what system one works on, and this is where emotions are about. They're about stories. They're not about numbers. So it's always about stories. And what happens when you have 500,000, you have lost a story. A story, to be vivid, has to be about an individual case. And when you dilute it by adding cases, you dilute the emotion. Now, what you're describing in terms of the moral response to this is no longer an emotional response.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  And this is already, you know, this is cognitive morality. This is not emotional morality. You have disconnected from the emotion. You know that it's better to save 500,000 than 5,000, even if you don't feel better about saving 500,000. So this is passing on to system two. This is passing on to the cognitive system, the responsibility for action.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  And you don't think that that handoff can be made in a durable way?

• 29:16Speaker 02

  I think it has to be made by policymakers. And policymakers, you know, we hire some people to think about numbers and to think about it in those ways. But if you want to convince people that this needs to be done, you need to convince them by telling them stories about individuals, because numbers just don't catch the imagination of people.

• 29:41Speaker 01

  What does the phrase cognitive ease mean in your work?

• 29:45Speaker 02

  Well, it means that some ideas come very easily to mind and others come with greater and greater difficulty to the point of, so that's, that's what cognitive, it's, it's also called fluency.

• 30:01Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  It's, you know, what's, what's easy to think about. And there is a correlation between fluency and pleasantness, apparently, that pleasant things are more fluent, they come more easily, not always more easily, but yes, they're more fluent. And fluency is pleasant, so there is that interaction between fluency and pleasure, which I hope replicates.

• 30:26Speaker 01

  So, but, so the picture I get is of, I don't know if you've referenced this in your, in your book, I can't remember, but what happens, what we know from, you know, split brain studies, that for the most part, the left linguistic hemisphere confabulates, it's continually manufacturing discursive stories that ring true to it. And there's, in the case of actual neurological confabulation, there's no reality testing going on, there's not, it's just, it's telling a story that is being believed. But it seems to me that most of us are in a similar mode, most of the time, that there's a very lazy reality testing mechanism coming online.

• 31:09Speaker 01

  And it's just easy to take your own word for it, most of the time.

• 31:16Speaker 02

  I think this is really, as, as you say, this is a normal state. The normal state is that we're telling ourselves stories. We're telling ourselves stories to explain why we believe in things.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  More often than not, retrospectively, in a way that has, bears no relationship to the system one, bottom up reasons why we feel.

• 31:36Speaker 02

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

• 32:18Speaker 01

  Is that going to replicate?

• 32:19Speaker 02

  That one replicates, I'm pretty sure. You know, I hope so. Yeah, I'm sure.

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Do you have a favorite cognitive error or bias?

• 32:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Which, which of your ugly children do you like the most?

• 32:34Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I think, I mean, it's a, it's, it's not the simplest to explain, but my, my favorite one is sort of extreme predictions. When you have very weak evidence and on the basis of very weak evidence, you draw extreme conclusions. I call it, technically, it's called non regressive prediction, and it's my favorite.

• 32:57Speaker 01

  Right, right. Where, where do you see it appear, is there an example of it that you?

• 33:02Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, you see it all over the place, but when, you know, when very obvious situation is in job interviews. So, you know, you, you interview someone and you have a very clear idea of how they will perform. And even when you're told that your ideas are worthless, because in fact, you cannot predict performance or can predict it only very poorly, it doesn't affect it. Next time you interview the person, you have the same confidence, interview somebody else. I mean, that's something that I discovered very early in my career. I was an officer in the Israeli army as, as a draftee. And I was interviewing candidates for officer training.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  And I discovered that I had that uncanny power to know who will be a good officer and who won't be. And I really could tell, you know, interviewing people, I knew their character. You get that sense of, you know, confident knowledge. And then the statistics showed that actually we couldn't predict anything. And yet the confidence remained. It's, it's very strange.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Right. Well, so there must be a, a solution for that. Those, some people following your work must recommend that you either don't do interviews or, or heavily discount them, right?

• 34:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's absolutely true. Don't do interviews mostly.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:28Speaker 02

  And don't do interviews in particular, because if you run an interview, you will trust it too much. So, there have been many cases, you know, studies, I don't know about many, but there have been studies in which you have candidates, you have a lot of information about them. And then if you add an interview, it makes your predictions worse. Especially if the interviewer is the one who makes the final decision. Because when you interview, this is so much more vivid than all the other information you have, that you put way too much weight on it.

• 35:05Speaker 01

  Is that also a story about just the power of, of face to face interaction and?

• 35:09Speaker 02

  It's, it's face to face interaction, it's immediate, you know, anything that you experience is, you know, if you, is very different from being told about it. And, you know, as scientists, one of the remarkable things that I know is how much more I trust my results than anybody else's.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 35:29Speaker 02

  So, and, and that's true of everybody I know. You know, we trust our own results. Why? No reason.

• 35:40Speaker 01

  All right, now let's talk about regret.

• 35:42Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  What, what is the power of regret in our lives? How do you, how do you think about regret?

• 35:49Speaker 02

  Well, I think regret is, is an interesting emotion and it's a, it's a special case of an emotion that has to do with counterfactual thinking. That is, regret is not about something that happened, it's, it's about something that could have happened but didn't. And I don't know about regret itself, but anticipated regret, anticipation of regret plays an important role in lots of decisions. That is, there's a decision and you tell yourself, well, if, if I don't do this and, you know, and it happens, then how will I feel? That expectation of regret is very powerful. And it's well known in financial decisions and, and a lot of other decisions.

• 36:34Speaker 01

  And it's, it's connected to loss aversion as well, right? So it'd be, you'll regret it more.

• 36:39Speaker 02

  It's a form of loss. And it's quite vivid, that you, you're able to anticipate how you will feel if something happens. And that becomes very salient.

• 36:50Speaker 01

  Well, does the asymmetry with respect to how we view losses and gains make sense ultimately? I mean, is, I think at some point in your work, you talk about an evolutionary rationale for it, because suffering is worse than pleasure is good, essentially, because there's a survival advantage for those who are making greater efforts to avoid suffering. But it also just seems like there's, if you, if you put in the balance of possibility, the worst possible misery and the greatest possible pleasure. I mean, if I told you, we could have the night we're going to have tonight, and it will be a normal night of conversation, or there's a part of the evening where I can

• 37:31Speaker 01

  give you the worst possible misery for a half hour, followed by the best possible pleasure.

• 37:38Speaker 02

  Let's have a conversation.

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's just, yeah, let's just get a cheese burner and a Diet Coke. The prospect of suffering in this universe seems to overwhelm the prospect of, of happiness or well-being. I, I know you, you put a lot of thought into the power of sequencing. I, I can imagine that feeling the misery first and the pleasure second would be better than the reverse.

• 38:01Speaker 02

  Much.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  But, but it's, it's not going to be enough to, to make it seem like a good choice, I would imagine. How do you, how do you think of this asymmetry between?

• 38:07Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, you know, it's, the basic asymmetry is between threats and opportunities. And threats are more immediate and they're, so in many situations, it's not true everywhere, there are situations where opportunities are very rare. But threats are immediate and they have to be dealt with immediately. So the priority of threats over opportunities must be built in by and large evolutionarily.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  But do you think we could extract an ethical norm from this asymmetry? If, for instance, could it be true to say that it is more important to alleviate suffering than to provide pleasure? If we had some way to calibrate the, the magnitude of each?

• 38:53Speaker 02

  And the first, we did a study, Dick Thaler and Jack Natch and I did a study a long time ago about intuitions about fairness. And it's absolutely clear that that asymmetry rules intuitions about fairness. That is, there is a very powerful rule of fairness that people identify with, not to cause losses. That is, you have to have a very good reason to inflict a loss on someone. The injunction to share your gains is much weaker. So that asymmetry, what we call the rights that people have, quite frequently, the negative

• 39:34Speaker 02

  rights that people have, is the right not to have losses inflicted on you. So there are powerful moral intuitions that go in that direction. And the second question that you asked, because that was a compound question about well-being.

• 39:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, in recent decades, there's tremendous emphasis on happiness and the search for happiness and the responsibility of governments to make citizens happy and so on. And one of my doubts about this line of work and this line of thinking is that I think that preventing misery is a much better and more important objective than promoting happiness. And so the happiness movement, I have my doubts about on those grounds.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Given what you said, it's hard to ever be sure that you've found solid ground here. So there's the intuition that you just cited, that people have a very strong reaction to imposed losses that they don't have to unshared gains, right? You do something that robs me of something I thought I had, I'm going to feel much worse about that than just the knowledge that you didn't share some abundance that I never had in the first place. But it seems that we could just be a conversation away from standing somewhere that makes that asymmetry look ridiculous, analogous to the Asian disease problem, right?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Like, it's a framing effect that we are, we may have an evolutionary story to tell about why we're here, but given some opportunity to be happy in this world, it could seem counterproductive. I say this already being anchored to your intuition. I share this situation.

• 41:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that, you know, in philosophical debates about morality and well-being, there are really two ways of thinking about it. And there is one way about when you're thinking of final states and what everybody will have. And there, there is a powerful intuition that you want people more or less to be equal, or at least not to be too different. But there is another way of thinking about it, which is, given the situation and the state of society, how much redistribution do you want to impose? And there, there is an asymmetry because you are taking from some people and giving it to others. And you don't get to the same point.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  So we have powerful moral intuitions of two kinds, and they're not internally consistent. And loss aversion has a great deal to do with that.

• 42:15Speaker 01

  So, given that there are many things we want and don't want, and we want and don't want them strongly, and we are all moving individually and collectively into a uncertain future where there are threats and opportunities, and we're trying to find our way, how do you think about worrying? What is the advantage of worrying? If there was a way to just not worry, is that an optimal strategy? I think the Dalai Lama most recently articulated this in a meme, but this no doubt predates him. Take the thing you're worried about, right? Either there's something you can do about it or not. If there's something you can do about it, well, then do that thing. If you can't do anything about it, well, then why worry? Because you're just going to suffer twice, right?

• 43:00Speaker 01

  How do you, how do you think about worry, given your work here?

• 43:03Speaker 02

  Well, I don't think my work leads to any particular conclusions about this. I mean, the Dalai Lama is obviously right, you know, why worry? But...

• 43:13Speaker 01

  Some people are going to tweet that, and it's not going to work out well for you.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  On the other hand, on the other hand, I would like to see people worry a fair amount about the future. And even because you don't know right now whether or not you'll be able to do anything about it.

• 43:30Speaker 01

  Right. Maybe worry, the only way to get enough activation energy into the system to actually be motivated to do something is to...

• 43:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, is to worry. You know, one of the problems, for example, when you're thinking of climate change, one of the problems, you can't make people worry about something that is so abstract and distant.

• 43:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:49Speaker 02

  And, you know, if you make people worry enough, things would change. But there is, scientists are incapable of making the public worry sufficiently about that problem.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  To steal a technique that you just recommended, if you could make a personal story out of it, that would sell the problem much more effectively. It just, climate change is a very difficult thing to personalize.

• 44:13Speaker 02

  It's very difficult to personalize, and it's not immediate. So it really, climate change is the worst problem, in a way, the problem that we're least well-equipped to deal with because it's remote, it's abstract, and it's not a clear and present danger. I mean, a meteorite, you know, coming to Earth, that would mobilize people. Climate change is a much more difficult problem to deal with, and worry is part of that story.

• 44:45Speaker 01

  It's interesting that a meteorite would be different. I mean, even if you put it far enough out there, so you have an Earth-crossing asteroid in 75 years, there would still be some counsel of uncertainty. People would say, well, we can't be 100% sure that something isn't going to happen in the next 75 years that will divert this asteroid. Other people will say, well, surely we're going to come up with some technology that would be onerously costly for us to invent now, but 20 years from now could be trivially easy for us to invent, so why steal anything from anyone's pocketbook now to deal with it? You could run some of the same arguments, but there's something, the problem is crystallized in a way.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  The difference is, there is a story about the asteroid. You have, you have a clear image of what happens if it hits, and the image is a lot...

• 45:37Speaker 01

  Climate change, ironically.

• 45:38Speaker 02

  It's a lot clearer than climate change.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  So, one generic issue here is the power of framing. I mean, we are, we are now increasingly becoming students of the power of framing, but we are not, we should just be able to come up with a list of the problems we have every reason to believe are real and significant, and sort those problems by the variable of, this is the set of problems that we are, we know that we are very unlikely to feel an emotional response to, right? We are just, we are not wired to appreciate, to be motivated by what we rationally understand

• 46:24Speaker 01

  in these areas, and then take the cognitive step of deliberately focusing on those problems. If we did that, if, you know, if everyone in this room did that, what we're then left with is a political problem of selling this attitude toward the rest of...

• 46:40Speaker 02

  I mean, you know, you use the, you use the tricky word there, and the word is "we." Who is "we"? I mean, you know, in, in that story, who is "we"? So you're talking about a group of people, possibly political leaders, who are making a decision on behalf of the population that, that in a sense, they treat like children who do not understand the problem. It's, it's quite difficult to...

• 47:06Speaker 01

  Surely you can't be talking about our current political leaders.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  No, I'm not. But it's actually, it's really difficult to see how democracies can effectively deal with a problem like climate change. I mean, you know, if I had to, to guess, I would say China is, is more likely to come up with effective solutions than the West.