00:04:22.200Okay, well, nobody wants to hear your problems, Dan.
00:04:24.660so how would you how do you think about your body of work how do you summarize the
00:04:35.260intellectual problems you have tried to get your hands around you know it's been just a series of
00:04:41.740problems that occurred that i worked on there was no big program when you look back of course i mean
00:04:47.820you see patterns and you see ideas that have been with you for a long time but there was really no
00:04:54.280plan. I was, you know, you follow, you follow things, you follow ideas, you follow things that
00:05:01.060you take a fancy to. Really, that's a story of my intellectual life. It's just one thing after
00:05:07.100another. Judging from the outside, it seems to me that you have told us much of what we now think
00:05:13.280we know about cognitive bias and cognitive illusion. And really, the picture is of human
00:05:23.620ignorance having a kind of structure. It's not just that we get things wrong. We get things
00:05:28.420reliably wrong. And because of that, whole groups, markets, societies can get things wrong because
00:05:35.680the errors don't cancel themselves out. I mean, bias becomes systematic. And that obviously has
00:05:41.300implications that touch more or less everything we care about. Let's just, I want to track through
00:05:48.100your work, you know, as presented in your now famous and well-read book, Thinking Fast and
00:05:54.440Slow. And I just want to try to tease out what should be significant for all of us at this
00:06:00.580moment, because, you know, human unreason, unfortunately, becomes more and more relevant,
00:06:04.720it seems, and we don't get over these problems. And I guess I wanted just to begin to ask you
00:06:11.800about a problem that's very close to home now, what is called the replication crisis or
00:06:17.660reproducibility crisis in science, in particular social sciences and in particular psychology.
00:06:23.700And for those in the room who are not aware of what has happened and how dire this seems,
00:06:28.940it seems that when you go back to even some of the most celebrated studies in psychology,
00:06:35.140their reproducibility is on the order of 50, 60 percent in the best case. So there was one study
00:06:41.700done in that took 21 papers from Nature and Science, which are the most highly regarded
00:06:47.980journals, and reproduced only 13 of them. And so let's talk about the problem we faced in even
00:06:56.240doing science in the first place. Well, I mean, you know, the key problem and the reason that
00:07:01.820this happens is that research is extensive. And it's extensive personally, and it's extensive
00:07:10.240in terms of money. And so you want it to succeed. So when you're a researcher, you know what you
00:07:16.380want to find. And that creates biases that you're not fully aware of. And I think a lot of this is
00:07:23.720simply self-delusion. That is, you know, there is a concept that's known as p-hacking, which is
00:07:30.620people very honestly deluding themselves about what they find. And there are several tricks of0.83
00:07:38.080a trade that people know about them, you are going to do an experiment. So instead of having
00:07:43.580one dependent variable where you predict the outcome, you take two dependent variables. And
00:07:48.900then if one of them doesn't work, you stay with the one that doesn't work. You do that and things
00:07:56.700like that a few times, then it's almost guaranteed that your research will not be replicable.
00:08:02.980And that happens. It was first discovered in medicine. I mean, it's more important in medicine
00:08:07.800than it is in psychology, where somebody famously said
00:08:11.340that most published research in medicine is false.
00:08:15.140And a fair amount of published psychological research is false, too.
00:08:19.440Yeah, but even some of the most celebrated results in psychology,
00:08:23.420like priming and the marshmallow test and...
00:08:27.020Well, yeah, I mean, it's not only, it's actually,
00:08:31.540they get celebrated in part because they are surprising.
00:08:35.200Yeah. And the rule is, you know, the more surprising the result is, the less likely it is to be true.
00:08:42.640So that's how celebrated results get to be non-replicable.
00:08:47.520Right. Well, and the scariest thing I heard, I don't know how robust this study was,
00:08:53.040but someone did a study on trying to replicate unpublished studies and found they replicated better than published studies.
00:09:01.040Did you hear this? I don't think that's replicable.
00:09:03.040let's hope not let's talk about system one and two these are the structures that give us so much
00:09:11.740of our what can be a dispiriting picture of human rationality summarize for us what are these two
00:09:19.160systems you you talk about i mean before starting with anything else there are clearly two ways that
00:09:25.540ideas come to mind i mean so if i say two plus two then an idea comes to your mind you haven't
00:09:32.720ask for it. You're completely passive, basically. Something happens in your memory.
00:09:38.120If I ask you to multiply, you know, 24 by 17 or something like that, you have to work to get that
00:09:44.080idea. So it's that dichotomy between the associative, effortless, and the effortful.
00:09:51.800And that is phenomenologically obvious. You start from there. And how you describe it,
00:09:58.880And whether you choose to describe it in terms of systems, as I did, or in other terms, that's already a theoretical choice.
00:10:07.300And 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.
00:10:16.100And then you have to describe it in a way that could be useful.
00:10:21.200And what I mean by that is you have to describe the phenomena in a way that will cause, help researchers have good ideas about facts and about experiments to run.
00:10:33.660And the system one and system two was, it's not my dichotomy and even not my terminology.
00:10:41.360And in fact, it's a terminology that many people object to, but I chose it quite deliberately.
00:10:47.600What are the liabilities? Because people in your book, you try to guard against various misunderstandings of this.
00:10:54.820Well, 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.
00:11:09.800that's a no-no. And system one and system two are really homunculi. So I knew what I was doing
00:11:16.180when I picked those. But the reason I did was that system one and system two are agents. They
00:11:24.200have personalities. And it turns out that the mind is very good at forming pictures and images of
00:11:31.020agents that have intentions and propensities and traits and they're active. And it's just easy to
00:11:40.160get your mind around that. And that's why I picked that terminology, which many people find sort of
00:11:45.980objectionable because they're really not agents in the head. It's just a very useful way to think
00:11:51.980about it, I think. So there's no analogy to be drawn between a classical, psychological,
00:11:59.520even Freudian picture of the conscious and the unconscious. How do you think about consciousness
00:12:04.880and everything that precedes it in light? I mean, you know, it's clearly related in the sense that
00:12:11.120what I call system one activities, the automatic ones, one characteristic they have is that you're
00:12:18.380completely unconscious of the process that produces them. You just get, you know, you get
00:12:23.020the results. You get four when you hear two plus two. In system two activities, you're often
00:12:28.900unconscious of the process. You know what you're doing when you're calculating. You know what
00:12:33.880you're doing when you're searching for something in memory. So clearly consciousness and system
00:12:40.600two tend to go together. It's not a perfect, you know, and who knows what consciousness is anyway,
00:12:45.960but they tend to go together. And system one is much more likely to be unconscious and automatic.
00:12:52.560neither system is a perfect guide toward tracking reality but system one is is very effective in
00:13:00.920many cases otherwise we would it wouldn't have evolved the way it has but i guess maybe let's
00:13:05.840start with the picture of where our intuitions are reliable and where they reliably fail how
00:13:13.300do you think about the utility of intuition i'll say first about system one that our representation
00:13:19.680of the world most of what we know about the world is in system one we're not aware of it so that
00:13:25.880we're going along in life with producing expectations or being surprised or not being
00:13:33.160surprised by what happens all of this is automatic we're not aware of it so most of our thinking
00:13:39.400system one thinking most of it goes on in our mind goes on and we're not aware of it so that's
00:13:44.540and intuition is defined as, you know, knowing or rather thinking that you know something without
00:13:52.100knowing why you know it or without knowing where it comes from. And it's fairly clear, actually,
00:13:59.660I mean, that's a digression, but there is a guy named Gary Klein, a psychologist who really
00:14:04.680doesn't like anything that I do. And he... How does your system one feel about that?
00:14:11.100I like Gary a lot, actually, 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 for six years,
00:14:41.100before we came up with something and we published an article called The Failure to Disagree,
00:14:46.300because in fact, there is a fairly clear boundary about when you can trust your intuitions and when
00:14:52.500you can't. And I think that's summarized in three conditions. The first one is the world has to be
00:14:59.900regular enough. I mean, first of all, intuition is recognition. And that's Herbert Simon said
00:15:06.600that. You have an intuition. It's just like recognizing, you know, that it's like a child
00:15:11.280recognizing what a dog is. It's immediate. Now, in order to recognize patterns and reality,
00:15:18.720which is what true intuitions are, the world has to be regular enough so that there are
00:15:24.620regularities to be picked up. Then you have to have enough exposure to those regularities to
00:15:30.860have a chance to learn them. And third, it turns out that intuition depends critically on the time
00:15:38.780between when you're making a guess and a judgment and when you get feedback about it.
00:15:44.860The feedback has to be rapid. And if those three conditions are satisfied,
00:15:49.820then eventually people develop intuition so that the chess players, chess is a prime example,
00:15:55.900We're all three conditions unsatisfied.
00:15:58.360So after, you know, many hours, I don't know, 10,000 or not,
00:16:01.940but many hours, a chess player will have intuitions.
00:16:06.040All the ideas, all the moves that come to his or her mind
00:28:00.720Yeah. Because basically, and that's a system one characteristic, basically you're saving one life.
00:28:08.860You're thinking, you have an image, you have stories, and this is what system one works on.
00:28:13.440And 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.
00:28:35.220now what you're describing in terms of the moral response to this is no longer an emotional response
00:28:43.780and this is already you know this is this is cognitive morality this is not emotional morality
00:28:51.020you have disconnected from the emotion you know that it's better to save 500 000 than than 5 000
00:28:58.080even if you don't feel better about saving $500,000.
00:29:27.120But 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.
00:29:41.060What does the phrase cognitive ease mean in your work?
00:29:45.500Well, it means that some ideas come very easily to mind and others come with greater and greater difficulty to the point of.
00:29:55.040so that's that's what cognitive it's it's also called fluency right it's you know what's what's
00:30:03.620easy to think about and uh there is a correlation between fluency and pleasantness apparently that
00:30:11.620pleasant things are more fluent they come more easily not always more easily but yes they're
00:30:17.840more fluent and fluency is pleasant so there is that interaction between fluency and pleasure
00:30:23.680which I hope replicates. So the picture I get is of, I don't know if you referenced this in
00:30:31.660your book, I can't remember, but what happens, what we know from split brain studies that for
00:30:37.380the most part, the left linguistic hemisphere confabulates. It's continually manufacturing
00:30:43.420discursive stories that ring true to it. And there's, in the case of actual neurological
00:30:51.540confabulation there's no reality testing going on there's nothing it's just it's telling a story
00:30:57.200that is being believed but it seems to me that most of us are in a similar mode most of the time
00:31:04.340there's a very lazy reality testing mechanism coming online and it's just easy to take your
00:31:14.060own word for it most of the time i think this is really as as you say this is the normal state
00:31:20.400the normal state is that we're telling ourselves stories we're telling ourselves stories to explain
00:31:27.000why we believe in things more often than not retrospectively in a way that has bears no
00:31:32.560relationship to the system one bottom-up reasons why we absolutely i mean but you know for me the
00:31:39.600the example that was formative in is what happened with post-hypnotic suggestions
00:31:46.920So you put somebody under hypnosis and you tell them, you know, when I clap my hands,
00:31:53.040you will feel very warm and you'll open a window and you clap your hands and they get up and open
00:31:59.920a window. And they know why they opened the window. And it has nothing to do with the suggestion.
00:32:04.760It comes with a story. They felt really warm and uncomfortable and they needed air and they
00:32:11.380opened the window. Actually, in this case, you know, the cause, the cause was the hand was clapped.
00:32:18.340Is that going to replicate? That one replicates, I'm pretty sure. You know, I hope so. Yeah,
00:32:23.820I'm sure. Do you have a favorite cognitive error or bias? Yeah. Which of your ugly children do you
00:32:32.080liked the most uh oh yeah i think i mean it's a it's it's not the simplest to explain but my0.93
00:32:42.380favorite one is sort of extreme predictions when you have very weak evidence and on the basis of
00:32:49.040very weak evidence you draw extreme conclusions i call it technically it's called non-regressive
00:32:55.040prediction and it's my favorite right right where do you see it appearing is there an example of it
00:33:01.260that you? Oh, I mean, you see it all over the place, but when, you know, one very obvious
00:33:07.800situation is in job interviews. So, you know, you interview someone and you have a very clear idea
00:33:15.040of how they will perform. And even when you're told that your ideas are worthless, because in
00:33:21.000fact, you cannot predict performance or can predict it only very poorly, it doesn't affect
00:33:25.620it. Next time you interview the person, you have the same confidence. Interview somebody else. I
00:33:32.600mean, that's something that I discovered very early in my career. I was an officer in the Israeli
00:33:38.160army as a draftee, and I was interviewing candidates for officer training. And I discovered
00:33:45.560that I had that uncanny power to know who will be a good officer and who won't be. And I really
00:33:53.640could tell you know interviewing people i knew their character you get that sense of you know
00:33:59.880confident knowledge and then the statistics showed that actually we couldn't predict anything
00:34:07.240and yet the confidence remained it's it's very strange right well so there must be a solution
00:34:14.940for that those some people following your work must recommend that you either don't do interviews
00:34:48.600it makes your predictions worse especially if the interviewer is the one who makes the final
00:34:55.640decision because when you interview this is so much more vivid than all the other information
00:35:01.380you have that you put way too much weight on it is that also a story about just the power of
00:35:07.020face-to-face interaction and it's face-to-face interaction it's immediate you know anything
00:35:14.200that you experience is you know if you is very different from being told about it and you know
00:35:21.000as scientists one of the remarkable things that i know is how much more i trust my results than
00:35:28.060anybody else's right so and and that's true of everybody i know you know we trust their own
00:35:34.740results. Why? No reason. All right, then let's talk about regret. Okay. What is the power of
00:35:46.040regret in our lives? How do you think about regret? Well, I think regret is an interesting
00:35:53.460emotion, and it's a special case of an emotion that has to do with counterfactual thinking.
00:36:00.800That is, regret is not about something that happened.
00:36:03.580It's about something that could have happened but didn't.
00:36:07.060And I don't know about regret itself, but anticipated regret,
00:36:12.860the anticipation of regret plays an important role in lots of decisions.
00:36:17.320That is, there's a decision and you tell yourself,
00:36:19.320well, if I don't do this and it happens, then how will I feel?
00:36:25.380That expectation of regret is very powerful
00:36:28.440And it's well known in financial decisions and a lot of other decisions.
00:36:34.540And it's connected to loss aversion as well, right?
00:36:37.240Well, I mean, it's a form of loss, and it's quite vivid that you're able to anticipate how you will feel if something happens, and that becomes very salient.
00:36:49.700Well, does the asymmetry with respect to how we view losses and gains make sense, ultimately?
00:36:58.120I mean, 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.
00:37:12.860But 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.
00:37:22.320And if I told you we could have the night we're going to have tonight and it will be a normal night of conversation or there's a part of the evening where I can give you the worst possible misery for a half hour, followed by the best possible pleasure.
00:37:39.960Yeah. Let's just get a cheese burner and a Diet Coke. The prospect of suffering in this universe
00:37:46.740seems to overwhelm the prospect of happiness or well-being. I know you put a lot of thought
00:37:53.500into the power of sequencing. I can imagine that feeling the misery first and the pleasure second
00:37:59.600would be better than the reverse, but it's not going to be enough to make it seem like a good
00:38:04.800choice, I would imagine. How do you think of this asymmetry between pleasure and pain?
00:38:08.820You know, 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 a large evolutionary.
00:38:34.660But do you think we could extract an ethical norm from this asymmetry? For instance, could it be true to say that it is more important to alleviate suffering than to provide pleasure if we had some way to calibrate the magnitude of each?
00:38:53.400Well, in the first, we did a study, Dick Thaler and Jack Netsch and I did a study a long time ago about intuitions about fairness.
00:39:02.720And it's absolutely clear that that asymmetry rules intuitions about fairness.
00:39:08.260That is, there is a very powerful rule of fairness that people identify with not to cause losses.
00:39:17.800That is, you have to have a very good reason to inflict a loss on someone.
00:39:22.980The injunction to share your gains is much weaker.
00:39:28.420So that asymmetry, what we call the rights that people have,
00:39:33.420quite frequently the negative rights that people have,
00:39:36.260is the right not to have losses inflicted on you.
00:39:39.340So there are powerful moral intuitions that go in that direction.
00:39:45.380And the second question that you asked,
00:39:48.140because that was a compound question about well-being,
00:39:51.400yeah i mean i i think you know in in recent decades there's a tremendous emphasis on happiness
00:39:58.980and the search for happiness and the responsibility of governments to make citizens happy and so on
00:40:05.140and one of my doubts about this line of work and this line of thinking is that i think that
00:40:11.480preventing misery is a much better and more important objective than promoting happiness
00:40:17.200And so the happiness movement, I have my doubts about on those grounds.
00:40:24.460Given what you said, it's hard to ever be sure that you've found solid ground here.
00:40:29.920So 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?
00:40:40.660you do something that robs me of something I thought I had, I'm going to feel much worse
00:40:47.420about that than just the knowledge that you didn't share some abundance that I never had
00:40:51.180in the first place. But it seems that we could just be a conversation away from standing somewhere
00:40:59.060that makes that asymmetry look ridiculous, analogous to the Asian disease problem, right?
00:41:05.800Like it's a framing effect that we are, we may have an evolutionary story to tell about why we're
00:41:10.540here, but given some opportunity to be happy in this world, it could seem counterproductive.
00:41:18.160I say this already being anchored to your intuition. I share this situation.
00:41:22.740I think that in philosophical debates about morality and well-being, there are really two
00:41:32.220ways of thinking about it. And there is one way about when you're thinking of final states
00:43:13.180Some people are going to tweet that, and it's not going to work out well for you.
00:43:17.120On the other hand, I would like to see people worry a fair amount about the future.
00:43:24.320And even because you don't know right now whether or not you'll be able to do anything about it.
00:43:30.160Right. I mean, maybe worry. The only way to get enough activation energy into the system to actually be motivated to do something is to worry.
00:43:38.140You 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.
00:43:48.560And, you know, if you make people worry enough, things would change.
00:43:53.920But there is, scientists are incapable of making the public worry sufficiently about that problem.
00:44:01.220To 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.
00:44:10.260It's just, climate change is a very difficult thing to personalize.
00:44:13.200It's very difficult to personalize and it's not immediate.
00:44:16.220So 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.
00:44:33.740I mean, a meteorite coming to Earth, that would mobilize people.
00:44:38.240Climate change is a much more difficult problem to deal with, and worry is part of that story.
00:44:45.080it's interesting that a meteorite would be different i mean even if you put it far enough
00:44:50.440out there so you have an earth crossing asteroid in 75 years there would still be some council
00:44:58.380of uncertainty people would say well we can't be a hundred percent sure that something isn't going
00:45:03.900to happen in the next 75 years that will divert this asteroid other people will say well surely
00:45:10.560we're going to come up with some technology that would be onerously costly for us to invent now,
00:45:16.360but 20 years from now could be trivially easy for us to invent. So why steal anything from anyone's
00:45:22.160pocketbook now to deal with it? You could run some of the same arguments, but there's something,
00:45:27.020the problem is crystallized in a way. The difference is there is a story about the asteroid.
00:45:32.380You have a clear image of what happens if it hits and the image is a lot clearer than climate
00:45:40.160change. So one generic issue here is the power of framing. I mean, we are now increasingly
00:45:50.840becoming students of the power of framing, but we are not, we should just be able to come up with a
00:45:58.680list of the problems we have every reason to believe are real and significant and sort those
00:46:07.620problems by the variable of, this is the set of problems that we know that we are very unlikely
00:46:16.340to feel an emotional response to. We are not wired to be motivated by what we rationally
00:46:23.400understand in these areas. And then take the cognitive step of deliberately focusing on those
00:46:31.780problems. If we did that, if everyone in this room did that, what we're then left with is a
00:46:37.080political problem of selling this attitude toward the rest of I mean you know that you use the you
00:46:42.420use the tricky word there and the word is we who is we I mean you know in in that story uh who is
00:46:50.060we so you are talking about a group of people possibly political leaders who are making a
00:46:56.500decision on behalf of the population that that in a sense they treat like children who do not
00:47:01.920understand the problem i mean it's it's quite difficult surely you can't be talking about our
00:47:07.560current political leaders uh no i'm not uh but it's actually i find it difficult to see how
00:47:15.100democracies can effectively deal with a problem like climate change i mean you know if i had to0.96
00:47:20.840to guess i would say china is more likely to come up with effective solutions than the west
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