ReThinking: Daniel Kahneman doesn't trust your intuition (Re-release)

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Welcome back to rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. My guest today is Daniel Connomen. Danny won a Nobel Prize in Economics. He's been named one of the most influential economists in the world, but he's not on board with that. Danny is one of the great psychologists of our time, actually of all time. He may have read his influential book, Thinking Fast and Slip. This conversation with Danny challenged one of my core beliefs about intuition. It also gave me a new perspective on which ideas are worth pursuing. And since Danny's an expert on decision-making, I thought I'd start by asking about what we're actually trying to accomplish in so many of our choices. [Music] You've spent a lot of your career studying happiness in related topics. And really for the first time in my career, I started to wonder, why are we so obsessed with happiness as psychologists? I'm all for people leading enjoyable, satisfying lives. But if I had to choose, I would much rather have people focus on character, trying to build their generosity, their integrity, their commitment to justice, their humility. And I wonder if you could talk to me a little bit about whether you think we've lost our way a bit, and character has been too little in focus or too far in the background, or whether you think happiness deserves the attention it's gotten. Well, I think my focus would be neither happiness nor character. It would be misery. And I think that there is a task for society to reduce misery, not to increase happiness. And when you think of reducing misery, you would be led into very different policy directions. You would be led into mental health issues. You would be led into a lot of other problems. So reducing misery would be my focus. Character and happiness or misery are not substitutes. And the idea, which has been accepted both in the UK and in many other places, in quite a few other countries by now, is that the objective of society, objective of policy should be increasing human welfare or human wellbeing in a general way. I think that's a better objective for policy than increasing the quality of the population's character. I think it's a better objective, I think it's a more achievable objective. Except I would not focus on the positive end. I would focus on the negative end. And I would say it is a responsibility of society to try to reduce misery. And let's focus on that. We speak of length and not of shortness. And we speak of happiness. The dimension is labeled by its positive pole. And that's very unfortunate because actually increasing happiness and reducing misery are very different things. I agree. And it's interesting to hear you say that reducing misery is more important than promoting happiness. In some ways that feels like a critique of the positive psychology movement. It is. And tell me a little bit more about why. Well, I think the positive psychology movement has in some way is a deeply conservative position. That is, it says, let's accept people's condition as it is and let's make people feel better about their untranging condition. You know, there has been some critique of positive psychology along those lines. I'm not. I'm not innovating here. But I think that focusing on changing circumstances, on dealing directly with misery, is more important. And it's a worthier objective for society than making people feel better about their situation. Yeah, I mean, I think it certainly tracks with how I think about in general bad being stronger than good. And the alleviation of misery, contributing more to the quality of people's lives than, you know, some degree of elevating of the amount of joy that they feel. But I also wonder at times if this is not a false dichotomy that if you want to make people happy, it's awfully difficult to do that. If you don't pay attention to the misery or suffering that they might experience. Well, actually, we once did a study in which we, we were measuring how people see how much of the day are people in different states, positive or negative. And it turns out that people are in a positive state on average, 80% of the time, more than 80% of the time. That is on average, people are on the positive side of zero. Now, look at say the 10% of the time that people spend suffering overall. Most of the suffering is concentrated in about 10 to 15% of the population. So it actually is not the same people that you would make less miserable or happier. Those are different populations. And the question is, where do you direct the weight of policy and what do you pay more attention to? Very interesting. I like it. So you're basically saying, look, if we have scarce resources, whether those are financial or time or energy, we want to concentrate on the group of people who are suffering as opposed to those who might be languishing. Yeah. It seems to me that to some extent we have been trapped by a word. It's the word happiness, which seems to stand for the whole dimension. And I think this is leading to some policies. Actually, it is failing to lead to policies that would really be directed at increasing human well-being by decreasing misery. Yeah, I think so too. And it's something I've thought about a lot at work given the hat I wear most often is organizational psychologist. I feel like the obsession with employing engagement has really missed the mark. I don't go to work hoping that I'm going to be engaged today. I hope that I'm going to have motivation and meaning and that I'm going to have a sense of well-being. And I wonder if one of the effects that the pandemic has had on a lot of people and a lot of leaders in workplaces is to get them to recognize, you know what? We need to care about people's well-being in their lives, not just their engagement at work. Well, I thought that you know, I'm not an expert. This is your field of mind, but I thought that engagement has is close to feeling good at work. I mean, whether it's the responsibility of workplaces to deal with people's well-being in general. I agree that it's very responsible for dealing with people's well-being at work. And that doesn't seem to me to be very different from trying to make people engaged and happy with what they're doing. So I'm a bit curious to hear more about the dichotomy of the distinction that you're drawing between engagement and well-being. My interpretation of engagement was fairly close to well-being at work. Yeah, I think in large part it depends on which conceptualization and measure of engagement we're talking about. But one of the more interesting patterns in the literature that's gotten me thinking quite a bit is that it's possible to be an engaged workaholic. And this has been differentiated recently from being a compulsive workaholic. Are you working a lot because you find it interesting and worthwhile? Or are you doing it because you feel guilty when you're not working and you feel obsessed with the problem that you're trying to solve? And I think that one version of engagement is probably healthier than the other. And I associate well-being much more with being an intrinsically motivated workaholic than with a compulsive workaholic, even though both are highly engaged. I agree. You know, I worked for a while with Gallup. I was consulted with Gallup many years ago. And their concept of engagement, I think was a positive concept. One of the criteria that I remember for people being happy at work is having a friend at work. So clearly, at least their concept of engagement, which is the one that the only one that I know much about is by a larger positive concept. And certainly, we don't want people to be compulsive, although I don't know how to describe myself, for example, when I work hard or when I used to work very hard, was I doing so compulsively, was I doing so out of intrinsic motivation? I think both. I was intrinsically motivated, and I was compulsive about it. So I'm not sure of the distinction that you're drawing between being compulsive and being intrinsically motivated. Well, I like the call to look at ambivalence there, because I think it speaks to the point that you raised earlier, which is that positive emotions and negative emotions can coexist. You can work because you're passionate about it and because you feel bad if you're not doing it. That's right. I want to ask you about the joy of being wrong. The place I wanted to begin on this is to ask you, when you were growing up or earlier in your life, how did you handle making mistakes? - I'm hesitating because I can't. It's not that I didn't make any mistakes. I certainly made many, but I wasn't very impressed by my mistakes. I mean, they were not very salient in my life. So if you're asking about my early, you know, as a student and so on, I don't have much to report that's of an interest. As a researcher, I found my mistakes very instructed. And they were sort of positive experiences by and large. - It's such an odd thing to hear you say, because most of us, most of us experience pain, not pleasure, when we find out that we're wrong or we discover that we've made a mistake. So how did you arrive at a place where you've found that to be a teachable moment? - Well, you know, those are situations in which you're surprised. I've really enjoyed changing my mind because I enjoy being surprised and I enjoy being surprised because I feel I'm learning something. So that's been that way. I've been lucky, I think, because I think you're right that this is not universal, the positive emotion to corrected mistakes, but it's just another block. I'm not claiming I'm more around here. - It's fascinating to watch though, because I've seen your eyes light up and it's palpable, right? When you discover that you were wrong about a hypothesis or a prediction, you look like you are experiencing joy. And I've started to think a lot about what prevents people from getting to that place. And I think a lot of it is for so many people, they get trapped in either a preacher or a prosecutor mindset of saying, "I know my beliefs are correct or I know other people are wrong." And at some point their ideas become part of their identity. And I know even scientists struggle with this, right? I think at least when I was trained as a social scientist, I was taught to be passionately dispassionate, but I know a lot of scientists who struggle with detachment and you don't seem to. So how do you keep your ideas from, I guess, becoming part of your identity? - Well, I think that, I mean, this is going to sound awful. I have never thought that ideas are rare. And you know, if that idea isn't any good, then there is another that's going to be better. And I think that is probably generally true, but not generally acknowledged. So that for people to give up on an idea, may in many cases lead to sort of panic, if I don't have that idea, then what do I have? Who am I if I don't have that idea? So being less identified with your ideas is also associated, I think, with having many of them discovering that most of them are no good and trying to do the best you can with a field that's all good. - So it's seeing ideas as abundant rather than scarce, makes it easy to stay detached. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, I used to tell my students, ideas are a dime, it doesn't, I mean, don't over invest in your old ideas. And so I used to encourage my students to give up at a certain point. I certainly never wanted to read a dissertation by a student with a chapter that would explain why they experiment fail. So that was the kind of advice that I would give them. - Think of another idea. - Do you ever worry about getting too detached? I think, for example, about messenger RNA technology, which was seen as, I think, a joke for a long time. And if not for the courage and tenacity of a small group of scientists who persisted with it anyway, we might not have a COVID vaccine right now. - Oh, I think, well, in the post-place, science like many other social systems doesn't thrive on everybody being the same. So you may have some advice that is good for some people. And it's clear that some people who are irrationally persistent achieve great successes. And indeed, if you look back at great successes, you will generally find that there is some irrational persistence behind them. And irrational optimism behind them. That doesn't mean that when you're looking from the other side, that irrational optimism, more irrational persistence are good things to have. So the expected value of it might be negative, although when you look back, every big success, you can trace to some irrationality. - Well, that goes beautifully to one of my favorite ideas of yours that we look at successful people. And we learn from their habits, not realizing that we haven't compared them with people who failed, who had many of the same habits. And I wanted to, I guess, ask you a broader question, which is having put these kinds of decision heuristics and cognitive biases on the map. Which one do you fall victim to the most? Is it confirmation bias? It sounds like maybe not. I just wondered which of the biases that you've documented is your greatest demon. - All of them. Really, all of them, except as you said, confirmation bias. By the way, people are close to me, find this irritating. That is that whenever they have a problem with someone, I automatically take the other side and try to explain whether someone might be right after all. So I have that contrarian aspect to what I am. - This reminds me a little bit of possibly a powerful story that I think told to every doctoral student in social science these days, which is that not long after you won the Nobel Prize for your work on decision making, there was a journalist who asked you how you made tough decisions and you said you flip a coin. Is this true? - No. - Okay, good. - Absolutely. - I'm relieved. - I've never flipped a coin to make a decision in my life. The version of the story I heard was that you would flip the coin to observe your own emotional reaction and figure out what your biases were. I might have said that this is one of the benefits of flipping a coin, but I personally have never used it. But it's true that flipping a coin would be a way of discovering how you feel if you didn't know earlier. That I still believe. I feel very relieved to know that, 'cause I was worried about you, given all you know about decision making, making important life choices with the coin toss. (upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Wise, the app for international people using money around the globe. With Wise, you can spend and receive in over 40 currencies with no markups or hidden fees, whether you're sending pounds across the pond, spending rails and Rio, or getting paid in dollars for your side gig, you'll get the mid-market exchange rates on every transaction, join 50 million customers internationally. Be smart, get Wise. Download the Wise app today of visit Wise.com. Teas and C's apply. At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious, because the force is shaping our world can be hard to see. Follow NPR's Planet Money wherever you get your podcasts, and start seeing how the economy really works. You know, when I look back at my life, it's been a series of things that, you know, ultimately, I made decisions or I made life choices clearly, but I did not experience them as decisions. I have very little to say describing myself about making decisions in part because I have really strong intuitions and I follow them usually. So the decision doesn't feel hard if you know what you're going to do and if you know yourself and you're going to do it anyway, it doesn't feel very hard. I have to say, Danny, I'm a little shocked to hear you say that you follow your intuition because you have spent most of your career highlighting all the fallacies that come into play when we over rely on our intuition. Well, you really have to distinguish judgment from decision making and most of the intuitions that we've studied were fallacies of judgment rather than a decision making. And second, my attitude to intuition is not that I've spent my life, you know, saying that it's no good. In the book that we're writing, that we've just finished writing, our advice is not to do without intuition, it is to delay it. That is, it is not to decide prematurely and not to have intuitions very early. If you can delay your intuitions, I think they're your best guide problem you about what you should be doing. Okay. So two questions there, one is how, the other is why? Well, if they delay your intuitions, you know, and now I'm talking about formal decisions, decisions that might be taken within an organization or a decision that an interviewer might take in deciding whether or not to hire a candidate. And here the advice of delaying intuition is simply because when you have formed an intuition, you are no longer taking in information. You are just rationalizing your own decision or you're confirming your own decision. And there is a lot of research indicating that this is actually what happens in interviews. That interviewer spent a lot of time, they make their mind up very quickly and they spend the rest of the interview confirming what they believe, which is really a waste of time. Yes. So the idea of delaying your intuition is to make sure that you've gathered comprehensive, accurate, unbiased information so that then when your intuition forms, it's based on better sources, better data. Is that what you're after? Yes. Because I don't think you can make decisions without them being endorsed by your intuitions. You have to feel conviction. You have to feel that there is some good reason to be doing what you're doing. So ultimately, intuition must be involved. But if it's involved, if you jump to conclusions early or jump to decisions early, then you're going to make avoidable mistakes. This is an interesting twist on how I've thought about intuition, especially in a hiring context, but I think it applies to a lot of places. My advice for a long time is, don't trust your intuition. Test your intuition. Because I think about intuition as a subconscious pattern recognition. And I want to make those patterns conscious so I can figure out whether whatever relationship I've detected in the past is relevant to the present. It seems like that's what you've argued as well when you've said, look, you can trust your intuition if you're in a predictable environment. You have regular practice and you get immediate feedback on your judgment. I think the tension for me here is, I don't know how capable people are of delaying their intuition. And I wonder if what might be more practical is to say, okay, let's make your intuition explicit instead of implicit early on so that then you can rigorously challenge it and figure out if it's valid in this situation. I've been deeply influenced by something that I did very early in my career. I mean, when I was 22 years old. I set up an interviewing system for the Israeli Army. It was to determine suitability for combat units. And the interview system that I designed broke up the problem so that you had six traits that you were interviewing about. You were asking factual questions about each trait at the time and you were scoring each trait once you had completed the questions about that trait. Jumping in here because this is such a cool example, but it needs a little explaining. Danny created a system for interviewers to rate job candidates on specific traits, like work ethic and a political ability or integrity. But interviewers did not take it well. They really hated that system when I introduced it. And they told me, I mean, I vividly remember one of them saying you're turning us into robots. Danny decided to test which approach worked best. Was it their intuition or their ratings from the data? The answer was both. Their ratings plus their intuition. But not their intuition at the beginning. Their intuition at the end after they did the ratings. That is you rate those six traits and then close your eyes and just have an intuition. How good do you think the soldier is going to be? When the data came back, it turned out that that intuition at the end with the best single predictor, it was just as good as the average of the six traits and it added information. So wow. And I was surprised. I just was doing that as a favor to them, letting them have intuitions. But the discovery was very clear. And we ended up with a system in which the average of the six traits and the final intuition had equal weight. It sounds like what you recommend then concretely is for a manager to make a list of the skills and values that they're trying to select on to do ratings that are anchored on those dimensions. You know, I might judge somebody's coding skills if they're a programmer or their ability to sell if they're a salesperson. And then I might also be interested in whether they, you know, they're aligned on their organizational values. And then once I've done that, I want to form an overall impression of the candidate because I may have picked up on other piece of information that didn't fit the model that I had. I think that's about right. It's such a powerful step that I think should bring the best of both worlds from algorithms and human judgment. There's something that's a little puzzling to me about it though, which is why are managers and people in general so enamored with intuition? I think it's because people don't have an alternative. It's because when they try to reason their way to a conclusion, they end up confusing themselves. And so the intuition wins by default. It makes you feel good. It's easy to do and it's something that you can do quickly. Whereas careful thinking in a situation of judgment where there is no clearly good answer, careful thinking is painful. It's difficult and it leaves you in a state of indecision or in a state of even if one option is better than the other. You know that the difference is not something you can be sure of. Whereas when you go the intuitive route, you end up with over confident certainty and feeling good about yourself. So it's an easy choice, I think. You wrote about this topic at length in what some of college or magnum opus thinking fast and slow. I'm wondering what you've rethought since you published that book. Well, you know, there were things I published in that book that were wrong. I mean, you know, let me try quoted that didn't hold up. Now the interesting thing about that is that I haven't changed my mind about much of anything. But that is because changing your mind is really quite difficult. Dan Gilbert has a beautiful word he called that unbelieving and unbelieving things is very difficult. So I find it extremely hard to unbelieve aspects or parts of thinking fast and slow. Even though I know that my grounds for believing them are now much weaker than they were. But the more significant thing that I have begun to rethink is that thinking fast and slow, like most of the study of judgment and decision making is completely oblivious to individual differences. And all my career, I made fun of anybody who was studying individual differences. I say I'm interested in many facts. I'm interested in characterizing the history. human mind, but it turns out that when you go into detail, people, those studies that you have, it's not that everybody is behaving like the average of the study, that's simply false. There are different subgroups, we're doing different things and life turns out to be much more complicated than if you were just trying to explain the average. So the necessity for studying individual differences is, I think the most important thing that I have rethought, it doesn't have any implications for me because it's too late for me to study individual differences and I wouldn't like doing it anyway, it's not my style, but I think there is much more room for it than I thought when I was writing thinking fast and slow. Another thing I wanted to ask you about is the choices you make about what problems and projects to work on. I'm not a good example for anybody. I really never had a plan, I'm more or less followed my nose and I did many things that I shouldn't have done. I wasted a lot of time on projects that I shouldn't have carried out, but I've been lucky. Well I think that's probably an encouraging message for a lot of us. The idea is this is an area where there is gold and I'm going to look for it. That's an idea and formulating a new question, that's an idea in my book. I'm going to use that. This is an area where I think there might be gold and I want to look for it. Such a nice reframe. Danny, you mentioned your new book noise. One of my favorite ideas when I read noise was the idea of the inner crowd and I wondered if you could explain that. There have been two lines of research by Roland Paschler and by Hurt Wake on asking people the same question on two occasions or in two different frames of mine. It turns out that when you ask the same question like an estimate of the number of airports, when you ask people the same question twice, separated by some time, then they tend to give you different answers and the average of the answers is more accurate than each of them. Separately, it also in the case that the first answer is more valid than the second and it's also the case that the longer you wait, the better the average is, the more information there is in the second judgment that you make. What it indicates is clearly that what we come up with when we ask ourselves a question is we're sampling from our mind, we're not extracting the answer from our mind, we're sampling an answer from our mind and there are many different ways that that sample could come out and sampling twice, especially if you make them independent, sampling twice is going to be better than sampling once. This is one of the most practical, unexpected decision making and judgment perspectives that I've come across in the last few years. In part because it says, I don't always need a second opinion if I can get better at forming my own second opinions. You know, I think as we say in that chapter, sleep over it is really very much the same thing that as sleep over it, just wait and tomorrow you might think differently. So the advice is out there, brain forcing it may be useful. Your collaboration with Amit Stversky is obviously legendary. There's a whole Michael Lewis book about it. Is there a lesson that you took away from that collaboration that's informed either how you choose your collaborators now or how you work with the people on your teams? I think that one really important thing is to be genuinely interested in what your collaborator is saying. And I'm quite competitive. I'm also a square competitive. We were not competitive when we worked together. The joy of collaboration for me always was that almost that was more with Amit Stversky and with almost anyone else. I would say something and he would understand it better than I had. And that's the greatest joy of collaboration. But in my other collaborations, taking pleasure in the ideas of your collaborator seemed to be very useful and I'd be lucky that way. On that note, almost anyone who's ever want to know about prize has complained that it it hurt their career. And I've wondered what the experience has been like for you. Oh, I mean, it would speak to his career if they're young. I got my money when I was 68 and for me it was a net plus. Why does it give people in trouble if they get it earlier? Oh, you know, there are a variety of ways that this can happen. The first place, it's very distracting. I mean, people start taking you more seriously than they did and hanging on your every word and a lot of nonsense like that. And if you begin to take yourself too seriously, that's not good. If you take time away from your work to do what you're invited to do when you get a Nobel, which is a lot of talking and a lot of talking and thinking that you don't know much about, that's a loss. And then if it makes you self conscious that everything that you have to do has to be important, that's a loss. So there are many different ways, I think, in which getting a Nobel early is a bad idea. I mean, it's not the best. I was at a good age to get it because I had some years left in my career and it made many things much easier having a Nobel. And it made the end of my career more productive, I think. And I'm happier than it would have been other ones. Rethinking is part of the Ted Audio Collective. The show is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and produced by Ted with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Reddicoke, Dan O'Donnell, Joanne Deluna, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quinn, Van Van Chang and Anna Fielin. This episode was produced by Constanza Gallardo and Jessica Glazer. Our show is mixed by Rick Kwant, original music by Hans Steele Sue and Allison Litton Brown, additional production by Cosmic Standard. Each story you hear on Planet Money starts with a question. At NPR, we stand for your right to be curious because the force is shaping our world can be hard to see. Follow NPR's Planet Money wherever you get your podcasts and start seeing how the economy really works.