Thinking, Fast and Slow | Daniel Kahneman | Talks at Google

John Boyd: Very good. I'm John Boyd. It is my great pleasure to introduce Professor Kahneman to you today. And I just want to give you a brief summary of his outstanding career. In 1954 he graduated in experimental psychology and mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 1961, he earned his Ph.D. from the University of California Berkeley, across the bay, in Experimental Psychology. In 1979, he and his co-author Amos Tversky published their seminal paper on prospect theory, which began to change the way people reframed the argument around gains, losses, and decision-making under conditions. of uncertainty. Several years later, in 2002, Professor Kahneman received the Nobel Prize largely for his work on prospect theory.

And the Nobel Prize is not always impressive; Perhaps it is more so because there is no Nobel Prize in Psychology. He had to win his Nobel Prize in Economics. And as far as I know, there is only one other person, one other psychologist, who won a Nobel Prize and that is Ivan Pavlov. He may be a physiologist, we could argue about that. Years later, in 2007, Psychologist attempted to claim Professor Kahneman as one of its own when the American Psychological Association awarded him its Distinguished Lifetime Contribution Award. And today he's a senior scholar at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and he's here to talk about his new book Thinking Fast and Slow.

Now Google's mission, as we all know, is to take the world's information and make it more useful and universally accessible. And all information, all knowledge, is important, but I think some are more important than others. Because the information that you will present today I think is very personal; It's about each one of us. And if you listen carefully, it will change the way you think about yourself and the world around you. Please join me in welcoming Professor Kahneman to Google. Kahneman: Thank you. Well, I think there has been a lot of talk about intuition in recent years and I will talk about intuition.

There are two sides to this discussion, naturally, the pros and the cons. And of course, many people here will have read Malcolm Gladwell Blink, which while not an unconditional defense of intuition, certainly gave people the impression that sometimes we magically know things without knowing why we know them. Within the discipline of psychology and decision making there is a group and it is headed by a very interesting figure called Gary Kline who wrote a book that I recommend. The Sources of Power is one of the books he would most warmly recommend. And they are big believers in expert intuition.

On the other hand, there are skeptics about intuition in general, including expert intuition. And I have long been considered one of the skeptics because my early work with Amos Tversky was about intuitive errors, flaws and biases of intuitive

thinking

. Today this discussion is found in many places and, for example, in medicine among popular writers; two writers who write for the New Yorker, Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande. They are clearly differentiated. Atul Gawande is a supporter of formal systems, very skeptical of human judgment and eager to prove it all the time and Jerome Groopman is, although he does not quite admit that he really likes good old-fashioned medical intuition.

Of course he likes well-trained doctors. But he doesn't like the formal system and the question in medicine is "What is the role of evidence-based medicine and how does that map to the role of intuition?" Actually, the background, part of the background of what I'm going to talk about today, is a strange collaboration that I was involved in for about eight years with Gary Klein, who I mentioned. He is a guru to a group of people who really, I wouldn't say despise what I do, but they certainly don't like what I do because they think that the emphasis and biases of judgment have painted an unfairly unfavorable picture of the world. human mind.

And I'm generally inclined to agree. Seven or eight years ago I invited him and we worked together for several years trying to figure out where the limit is. Where is intuition wonderful and where is it flawed? And I think we can say it. And we wrote an article at the end of six or seven years with a lot of vicissitudes that we went through since we basically disagreed. We wrote an article titled A Lack of Disagreement, because essentially I think we know and we both agree on what intuition can be trusted and what it can't. Emotionally we have not changed.

He still hates prejudice and doesn't think experts' mistakes are very funny, and I think experts' mistakes are pretty funny, so that's the difference. There are two ways of

thinking

that we are all familiar with. And there is a way, a way for the thoughts that come to mind and listen to this. You know about this lady I think she adapts as quickly as you know her hair is dark. And it is interesting to dwell a little on this. This is not something that the judgment that she is angry, the impression that she is angry. It doesn't seem like something you did.

It feels like something that happens. It happens to me. We have the basic experience that is a passive experience in those judgments. And that is true in the case of perception, when we see the world we do not decide to see it. It's true for printing. And what we call intuitive thinking is true in general. Just past. It comes from somewhere. And we are not the author of it. Now, there is another way that thoughts come to mind and I guess here you essentially didn't come up with anything, but the answer is 408. To produce 408, a completely different type of operation is required.

You have to recover the program you learned in school. The program consists of steps. You have to follow the steps. Attention must be paid successively to partial products, etc. And keep things in mind and keep the whole program in mind. Is that how it works. This is something you do. It's not something that happens to you. And there are many indications that this is how it works. One is what Physiology indicates and this is how it works: the pupil dilates. This is something I studied many, many years ago: people actually follow a program like that, if you have a problem like that, if you're going to do it mentally, your pupil will dilate.

The area will increase by about 50% as soon as you do this. And it will stay dilated while you're working and sort of collapse back to its normal size when you stop smoking or when you find the answer. This is another way that thoughts come to mind. And this is definitely not the intuitive way. Here we are, we feel a sense of urgency. We feel like something deliberate is happening and a very important aspect of that is that it requires effort and what psychologists mean by effort is basically, if you want a quick introduction to what effort is, this is something you can't do while you're spinning. left in traffic.

You can't do it and you shouldn't try. And the reason is that there is a limited capacity to exert effort. And if you are committed to that capacity or those resources on one task, there will be less availability for another task. Now, there is another function of System 2. And here I am going to tell you a riddle. Most of you are familiar with this. A bat and a ball together cost 1.10. The bat costs more than the ball. Of course, how much does the ball cost? By the way, how many people know this riddle? Ah OK. So it's still usable.

The point of this riddle is that the number came to your mind. And the number is ten cents. And I think everyone just. Perhaps here they are an exception, very few exceptions. People confess that the number ten cents immediately came to mind. Now it's bad. Ten cents and a dollar 10 are a dollar 20. The solution is five cents. The interesting thing here is that at Princeton, at MIT, at Harvard, and I don't know about Stanford or CalTech, about 50% of the students asked this question and the undergraduates said dime. And we learn something very interesting when someone says dime.

We found out they didn't score because if they had, they wouldn't say a dime. So there is a sense of trust that people have and that these particular people have and that leads us to another function of what I will call System 2. System 1 is the intuitive one; They perform those automatic activities and System 2 is the effortful one and the deliberate one. And the reason I classify this as System 2 operation is that self-control and the control of attention and deliberate effort are affected by other activities. So, in a trivial example, if someone is asked to hold seven digits in their head and then given a choice between chocolate cake, sinful chocolate cake, and virtuous fruit salad, they are more likely to choose the chocolate cake. chocolate than chocolate cake.

They would if they didn't have seven digits in their heads. It takes effort to control your impulses, even the slightest ones, like a preference for chocolate cake. So you should be aware that the difference between System 1 operations, the automatic ones, and System 2 operations, the deliberate ones, is very clearly seen while driving. So driving is a skill. And any measure of skill in a specialized activity is that things start to happen automatically. So you can drive and have a conversation. You can't turn left in traffic, but we can generally drive and talk. Driving is therefore largely automatic.

Braking, at any sign of danger, braking is completely automatic. That is, you can notice it while you are braking, but first you respond so that the response is immediate, it is completely automatic. Now, in some places, not here where people drive on snow or ice, they learn about skidding. And then occasionally you'll find yourself as a skidding driver. And then System 2 will kick in because in a skid you're not supposed to do anything that comes naturally to you. You should not brake or move away from the skid. You must leave the brakes alone and turn the steering wheel until you skid, something that is not intuitive at all.

Now, when people get a lot of practice with drifting, that becomes automatic too. So one thing we can say about System 1 and System 2, those two types of operations, are some of the basic innate operations, functions that we have, like having emotional reactions to things, all of this is System 1. No. we choose to do it. It just happens to us. But also System 1 is where the skill is. That's when we become skilled at something, it becomes automatic and demands your resources and we become very good at it. Now, the topic of intuition and I'm not sure here, but I suspect that Malcolm Gladwell really didn't do us any favors by giving us the sense that intuition has magic.

There really is no magic and we must understand how it works. Intuition and Herbert Simon, who was then a Nobel Prize-winning psychologist, economist and political scientist, Herbert Simon gave a very good definition of what intuition is. It is simply recognition. There's really no difference between a doctor recognizing an illness, you know, a particular illness by a facial expression or something, and a little kid learning, pointing at something and saying doggie. The little boy has no idea what the clues are but he just said. He simply knows that he is a dog without knowing why he knows it.

And if you think about it this way, this really demystifies intuition to a very considerable degree. And it also leads you to a sort of solution to the problem that Gary Klein and I were trying to solve. When can you trust intuition and when can't you? And then the question arises of whether the world is regular enough for you to learn to recognize things. Or did that particular individual then have the opportunity to learn the regularities of the world? And so, the world of chess players is very regular. And statistically, the world of poker players is very average.

So there is an element of chance, but there are rules and the mind is so fixed that if there are rules in the environment and we are exposed to them for a long time, and we get immediate feedback about what is right and what is wrong, or quite feedback immediately, we would acquire those rules. So we all have expert intuition, even if we are not doctors or great chess players. I recognize my wife's mood from a word on the phone. You know, most of you can do that. There are people you know very well. We all recognize a dangerous driver in the next lane.

And you know we get signals and we don't necessarily know what the signal is, but this person is driving erratically and could do something dangerous. And this is a lot of reinforced practice and we are very good at it. We can learn about that, there are differences. Among experts, among professionals, in the level of experience they have and depend on the level of intuitive experience they can develop. So, for example, let's compare anesthesiologists with radiologists. Anesthesiologists receive very good feedback, immediate feedback every time they do something wrong. You know they have those measurements in real time.

Radiologists get really miserable feedback about whether they are right or wrong. Therefore, an anesthesiologist might be expected to develop intuition much more than an anesthesiologist would be expected to develop it.radiologist. And that's part of the answer about intuitive experience. We need not disagree about this because we know precisely when intuitive experience is likely to develop. And as I said, that also means that intuitive experience will not develop in a chaotic universe or a chaotic world. So, for example, I personally don't think that will stop because people choose stocks to invest in and can develop intuition because the market simply takes care of it.

There is not enough regularity in what will happen to prices for intuitions to develop. We also know political forecasters who, when making long-term forecasts, are really no better than dart throwers.monkey. And they're certainly no better than the average New York Times reader. Intuitions and reason are not the fault of the expert. And that investigation has been carried out with experts, CIA analysts and regional experts. It's really not their fault that they can't predict the long-term future 10 or 15 years from now. They are quite good at short-term predictions. They really aren't any good at long-term predictions. It's not your fault.

It's the world's fault. The world is probably not predictable. And if the world is not predictable, then you are not going to predict it. When there are marginal situations where there is some predictability but poor formulas work better than individuals. That's the area where formulas consistently outperform individuals, and it's an area of ​​fairly low predictability. Because when there are weak signals, people are not very good at picking them up and they are not good at using them consistently. But formulas can be generated based on experience and will work better than individual judgment. Well. Now, I introduced you to System 1 and System 2 and told you something about skill and ability in System 1.

Now I would like to point out something that we sometimes have intuitions about and that applies to political forecasters and political forecasters. values ​​and all of us. Very often we have intuitions that are false. And they arise and come to mind and are subjectively indistinguishable from expert intuitions. So now I'm talking about people who have intuitions that are not based on experience. And they come. They are System 1 in the sense that they are effortless and automatic. And where do they come from? And that's what I'm going to try to illuminate, shed some light on the rest of the talk.

So I want to introduce you to System 1. And first of all, let me clarify one thing because I might forget it. I use System 1 and System 2, those very impactful terms and terms in my discipline. You're really not supposed to do that. Because all psychologists are told pretty early on, they are not supposed to explain what happens in the mind by invoking little agents inside the mind and explain what the mind does by what the little agents do. Those are homunculi and that's a bad word in psychology. I'm going to use System 1 and System 2 absolutely as homunculi.

Now, what do I have to say in my defense? First of all, well, I'm warning you. Those are fictional characters. They do not exist. I don't think there is System 1 and System 2. Don't look for them in the brain, because they are not two systems in the brain where one does one and the other does the other. So why am I using this terrible language? I'm using it because I think it's useful. It fits the way our mind works and to explain the background of that decision of why I use System 1 and System 2, I refer you to a very good book.

It is very entertaining. It's by Joshua Foer and it's called Moonwalking with Einstein. It came out earlier this year. And what the book is about. Joshua Foer is a science writer. And he went on to the United States Memory Championship. You may not know such a thing exists, but there is. So people memorize decks of cards and very, very long lists of things and perform feats that we think are completely extraordinary. Joshua Foer decided to find out what's going on. And a year later he was the champion: the United States Memory Champion. And the book is a story of how he did it.

And basically, the story that the Greeks somehow knew is that memory is very, very good at some things and terrible at other things. My memory is terrible at remembering lists. We're really not good at remembering lists. Memory is excellent for remembering routes through space. That evolution, evolution has given us the ability to remember routes and not lists. So now you can fool yourself. If you mentally have a list and want to remember it, then you create a mental path and distribute the items on your list along the path. And then when you want to remember the deck of cards or whatever, you go your route and pick items one after another, because you can do that.

It turns out that something very similar happens in another context. People are very good at thinking about agents. The mind is very well prepared to think about the agent. Agents have traits. Agents have behaviors. We understand agents. We form global impressions of their personalities. We're really not very good at remembering sentences where the subject of the sentence is an abstract notion. But an agent is very, very good. So remember that when I say that System 1 does X, what I mean is that x is a mental activity that can be performed effortlessly. You will remember much more about System 1 if you think about it doing things than if you think about those mental activities.

It helps me think and I think it helps other people understand. Well. Let me introduce you to System 1. I start with a study, just an extreme case of this study was done at UK University and indeed like in many biology departments. And like a lot of places in the UK, they have a little room that's a tea or coffee room, where people can make themselves tea or coffee and buy some biscuits, and there's an honesty box where they pay. And someone had the brilliant idea of ​​sticking a sign right above the honesty box and changing it once a week.

And so, this is the first week. And that is the poster. Week 2 is for flowers. Week 3 is the eyes. Etc. Now, the remarkable thing about this is that it is something that happens to people. They have no idea what is happening to them. In fact, they have no idea about the signs. They barely realize there are signs there. They certainly don't know that the signs change systematically. They have no idea that posters influence their behavior. System 1 can do those things. Many things happen in our minds that we are not fully aware of. In fact, we are not aware of anything.

And there's a link between eyes and being watched and being watched and not wanting to do bad things or wanting to do good things. All of this is deeply embedded in our associative memory and is activated. You see eyes, especially those big eyes, in week 1 and it does something to you that you may not realize. Now let me show you something else. This, I just want to list very briefly what happened to you in the first few seconds when I put this on the screen. And first of all, you read them. You read the words. Now, you had no intention of reading the words.

You didn't have to decide. You had to read them. You had no choice in the matter. Secondly, ideas, images and memories came to mind, probably none of them very pleasant. So that's the second thing. Another thing that happened is physics. You backed away. This is actually being measured. And when people are exposed to threatening words, they recoil. Therefore, to some extent, the threat is considered real. The symbolic threat is considered real. You made a disgusted face. You experienced disgust. And that's getting interesting because those things reinforce each other. So if you make a disgusted face, you are more likely to feel disgusted.

If you put on a smiling face, you're more likely to think things are funny. So you know, one of my favorite experiments in that sense is: you take a pencil and you put it in your mouth like that. And cartoons will seem more fun to you. Because, when you put a pencil in your mouth like that, you're making people smile. And just the simple muscle change is enough to feed back our emotions and feelings. This is all pretty important, because what it means is, as it occurs to you, let me add something. Then I'll fix it.

I think of System 1 largely in terms of what happens in associative memory. To think about associative memory, we can think of a gigantic network of ideas. And ideas are linked to each other in various ways, associatively, some of them are causes of other things or categories, for example, instances of. There are many different links but you have a great representation of what we have in mind. And at any given time, the stimulus activates a subset of those notes in that memory representation and then the activation spreads through the associative network; Not much, but it spreads a little.

So, for example, you are now and we can know that it is spreading, because we become sensitive to other ideas that have been activated in this way. So, for example, right now, if someone whispered words in your ear, you would be much more likely to detect and recognize words like sickness and smell, instinct, nausea and hangover. Many of the associations have been activated. You are not aware of any of them. You are not aware of anything. Those are not conscious activations. But they are still activations. And since these ideas are partially activated, a weak stimulus will be enough to make them cross the threshold.

Again, this is a very important function of System 1 associative memory. We are basically prepared by this expanding activation that prepares things for what might come next. You will be able to recognize and respond to things more easily than before. Then something else happens. And here are two words, banana vomit and you made a story. What happens, you know, there's really no need to do that, but sure enough, this was enough to create a causal link for bananas somehow causing the vomiting. You didn't make a conscious decision for that to happen, but we know that's the kind of thing that happens.

As soon as a stimulus is presented, we look for the causes; the associative machinery looks back and clings to possible causes. Here it is very easy to find a cause and you know that this has an effect. So you temporarily don't like bananas because an association has been created. And that happens because of causal increase. This should give you an idea of ​​one of the features of System 1. And to top that off, let me show you something else. This, then, is a famous psychological demonstration. Many of you may not have seen it. It is read as A B C.

It is read as 12, 13, 14, but B and 13 are physically identical. This tells us something very important about the way the associative machinery of System 1 works when faced with new stimuli. Everything becomes coherent. So in the context of letters, that ambiguous stimulus will be read as a letter. In the context of numbers, it will be read as a number. What is quite important here are two aspects, one is consistency and the other is that you are not aware of ambiguity. Ambiguity is removed. That is, you only get one interpretation. In this case, it is a coherent interpretation. And that's how the system works.

Generates associatively coherent representations of reaction to the situation. Associative memory or System 1 is also a very repository of world knowledge. So when an event occurs, our reaction depends on many things we know. And I'll give you my favorite example of this. These are people who listen to phrases while the events are registered in their brain. An upper class British male voice says, "I have a big tattoo, I have big tattoos all over my back." And about 3/10 of a second later the brain responds with a characteristic surprise. This is surprising if you stop to think about it.

There was that voice. It must be classified as an upper-class British voice. Now upper class British men don't have tattoos on their backs, something is strange and you get a surprised reaction. You get a mobilization of System 2 because System 2 is the one paying attention. The surprise draws attention. A male voice saying "I think I'm pregnant", of course, same thing. So, this system has world knowledge and uses it to classify situations as normal or abnormal and it does so at maximum speed. And it updates very quickly. Well, I'll tell you a story about the update. Update what you consider normal.

Now this is an anecdote. You are free to not believe me. I believe it because it is a personal experience. A few years ago we were on vacation in Australia in a complex of 40 small villas and in the evening we went to dinner the first night and met with a psychologist from Stanford. Ah, surprise, coincidence and we are very pleased to meet each other. Now, two weeks later, we are at the theater in London. And it gets dark. And we look. And then the lights come back on and next to me, the same guy. Now, the important thing is that I was less surprised the second time than the first.

Because "Oh, John, he's the guy I find everywhere." It takes very little time to create what we call "a norm." So one event, the second event is linked to the first. If I had met someone else, that's what impressed me. If I had met someone else, I would havesurprised more. And that's weird if you think statistically, it's crazy. But in fact, it was very clear and I wouldn't say that I consciously expect to see John wherever I go. But you know, if I'm going to meet someone, I'd be prepared to meet John. Now, I have mentioned something about causal thinking.

And I want to give you an idea of ​​how that works. So the question is, is it more likely that a mother will have blue eyes if her daughter has blue eyes or that her daughter will have blue eyes if her mother has blue eyes? Now, like bat and ball, there is an intuitive answer and the intuitive answer is that a daughter is more likely to have blue eyes if her mother has blue eyes than the other way around. If you stop to do the math assuming that the incidence of blue eyes is the same in two generations, the probabilities are strictly equal, but even before you do the math, your reasoning flows along causal lines.

Your thinking flows along causal lines. This happens intuitively. One of these feels good. It feels more coherent and the coherence we experience can become a probability judgment. That is, the confidence we experience is a probability judgment. Now I'm going to skip the other example. And I said before that people have intuitions that are not necessarily true. And that people trust judgments that are not necessarily true. And I'd like to present a kind of tentative theory about how that happened. And the general idea is very simple. When we are asked a question that we cannot answer, System 1 will usually give the answer to a related question that is easier.

And you will use that answer to the wrong question, the question that hasn't been asked, instead of the question that was asked. We call this the substitution mechanism: replacing an easier question with a difficult one. It happens automatically. People are not aware that this happens and it is a source of many intuitions that do not come from experience and are much less likely to be correct than intuitions that do come from experience, but come with the same confidence. There are several mechanisms involved in this matter of substitution and I would like to present them. One of them, which I call the mental shotgun, is that when you are ordered to perform an operation, you usually also perform other operations that are associatively related to it, they are related to the target operation, but they are different.

My favorite example is: I will say words and you must judge as quickly as possible whether the words rhyme or not. And the first couple of words is a vote note. That is easy. The second pair of questions is to vote goat. And voting goat is substantially more difficult than voting no. Because? Even though no one else asked you, you spelled it. And vote goat, there is a spelling mismatch. Although they rhyme at least as well as I pronounce them as a voting note, you have a conflict and the conflict holds you back. We usually calculate more than we intend to calculate.

And we can and that allows substitutions to occur. Let me give you an example of the substitution here. The question here would be: "Which of the three figures is largest on the screen?" And the answer is: "they are the same." The three figures on the screen are the same size. But it is a very powerful illusion. We see the figure on the right larger than the figure on the left. And we see it because we can't avoid it. Even though you were told to think of it as a two-dimensional object, you calculate the three-dimensional solution in which the object on the right is actually larger than the object on the left, and that's what you see.

There are many other examples of this general process. Another one I like is called the citation heuristic. Students are asked a couple of questions in a survey. How happy are you and the other is how many dates did you go on last month? And if you ask the questions in that order, the correlation is essentially zero. It turns out that there are many things in life that determine happiness and dating is not particularly important. You reverse the order. So you ask people, "How many dates did you go on last month and how happy are you with your life in general?" The correlation is .66.

What has happened and this is both a heuristic and an example of what I call an approach and an illusion. That you have an emotional reaction to the student has an emotional reaction to the question about the number of dates. That emotional reaction is there. Then they ask you the related question about happiness and without knowing that you are doing this, you substitute one for the other. And you can do it for many questions. Now, it's not that people are confused about what happiness is. They know that happiness is not satisfaction with the number of dates.

It's just that this is the answer that comes to mind to the question about happiness. There has been a substitution and you are not aware of it. Now, there is a process that is essential for this and this is another strange ability of System 1. We can map intensities in different dimensions. So I'll give you my standard example for this. This is Julie who is in her final year of graduation and she read fluently when she was 4 years old and the question is what is her GPA? And the funny thing is that you know more or less what her GPA is.

At least you have an idea. I mean, it's clearly about 3.2. It's clearly less than 4, about 3.7, which is perhaps ridiculous, of course. But how do people get to 3.7 or something like that? Well, that's how it goes. He read fluently at age 4. That gives us an impression of precocity. How precocious was she as a reader? And that people could express that in percentiles. What is the probability that you know a child who reads

fast

er than that? Then when they ask a question about what is her GPA? Unbeknownst to you, you are matching the percentiles and getting the GPA that is as extreme in the GPA distribution as reading at age 4 is in the reading age distribution.

Completely unconscious. Statistically, completely absurd. You should be much more regressive. This is not the correct answer. But this is a convincing subjective answer. This is one of the mechanisms that leads to intuitive errors, this substitution mechanism. And I'll give you one more example. International travel, this is an experiment. The experiment was carried out during a period when many terrorist incidents were occurring in Europe. So that's a background. How much will you pay for insurance that pays $100,000 in the event of death for any reason? And how much would you pay for insurance that pays $100,000 in the event of death in a terrorist incident?

People pay much more for the second than for the first. And the reason they do it is because there is an immediate answer: how afraid am I? And I'm more afraid, most people, I'm more afraid of the idea of ​​dying in a terrorist incident than they are of dying. And that is the mapping that takes place. Again, you know, that's how it works. This is the associative machinery. And when it is beautiful, it is not perplexed. Produces an answer to questions that you do not know how to answer. But it produces them by answering easier questions, and much of our mental life is carried out precisely in this way.

Let me come full circle and talk a little about subjective trust. Subjective confidence, which is closely related to the probability of being right, is actually not a judgment at all. Is a feeling. It's a feeling that people have. And I think we know where the origin of that feeling is. And it is System 1 if the fluency of its own processing is evaluated; valuing the coherence of the story that has been created to confront the current situation. And if the story is coherent, trust is high. Now this is disastrous in some ways, because you can make a very coherent story with very little information and with information that is in fact unreliable.

The quality of the story depends very little on the quality and quantity of the information, so people can be very confident with very little reason. Therefore, trust is not a good diagnostic for when you can trust yourself or someone else. And if you're going to evaluate whether you can trust someone who has a lot of trust, that's not the way to do it. The way to do this, as I said before, is to ask what environment they have been in. And have you had the opportunity to learn about its regularities? Subjective trust is not a good indicator.

That's the story I could tell in about 45 minutes about the two systems. So let me remind you that they don't exist. But I think you should feel free to think in those terms, because what you may be starting to do is you may be starting to get a sense of the personality of System 1 and System 2. Now, this is ridiculous, but having a Getting a sense of those personalities will allow you to think better about psychological events than if you just had a long list of unrelated phenomena. So those ideas, those personalities, have a certain coherence. And, you know, they're worth something in the currency of being able to make judgments.

Well. I think we should be open to questions. So. . John: We have the microphone up there and I also have handheld microphones if anyone has questions. Someone has to ask the first question. Man #1: Hey. How fixed or plastic are the processes of System 1? And are there things like mindfulness or emotional regulation that have an effect? Kahneman: As I've described, System 1 can be updated in terms of content very regularly. So you can learn in one test what is normal and what is not normal. What is very difficult to do is control its operation, its operating rules. So I don't know of much evidence that people, System 1, can change unless you have a quiet skill that requires reinforced practice.

What you can do and what people can clearly do is educate your System 2. And you can educate and learn to recognize situations where System 2 takes control and controls the reaction, thus avoiding some mistakes. You can't do too much. But if I don't sound optimistic about System 1 training, it's because I'm not. Man #2: Another question about Training System 1. You talked about reinforcement learning and time constants and immediacy in creating experience, but in a lot of the practices we have around creating development software, the time constants are somewhat longer and in particular You gave a counterexample: your visit to Australia and the United Kingdom and the fact that a single incident with John predisposed you to that association.

So I'm wondering if any tests have been done to see which time constants actually play a role here. Kahneman: No. In terms of updating and learning partnerships, this is something we can learn pretty quickly. You can be taught to be afraid of something without anything else happening. And so, in that sense, the associative memory of System 1 can be updated. And now you can develop expertise in software, which is a bit of a different story and is more like learning to be a chess master. And that requires a lot of experience. So you have a lot of reinforcement and it better be an effective reinforcement.

Now, when it comes to software, time to some extent is not a big problem. Because in the end you will see it all together: the mistake you made and the correct solutions. So time is not an important factor. Learning, you know, how not to steer a tanker, that reinforcement is very

slow

. And it's much harder to learn how to do that than it is to learn how to steer a smaller ship. Man #3: This is a pretty broad question, so please take it in whatever direction you want. But I was wondering how these systems come into play and how they are seen in the media and advertising, and maybe I was thinking about how it has changed over time.

Kahneman: Well, it's very clear that advertising is here to address System 1. It doesn't convey information to make judgments on. Move your emotions and create associations. That's what it aims to do and it's quite effective. So, a lot of politics is directed at System 1, a lot of political messages. The influences of System 1 activities and you know which ones are really important and we should be thinking about them. It's pretty scary. One of my colleagues at Princeton, my younger colleagues at Princeton, has done studies on the effects of facial characteristics on political preferences. And it's absolutely amazing. You take 538 photo pairs of the two contestants in each congressional race and show those photo pairs to Princeton students for 1/10 of a second and ask, "Which one looks more competent?" That predicts 70% of elections.

So the impact of System 1 on the decisions we make, for example how much to pay in an honesty box, is something we are rarely aware of and is much more than we think. Man #4: So, although you say that System 1 and System 2 do not appear as specific structures, have there been fMRI studies, diffusion spectral imaging, diffusion tensor imaging that highlight whether System 1 is more Initial activation of the primary brain and System 2 is more neocortex? Kahneman: Well, you know, System 1 is extremely sophisticated. So it's not, that's partly why I don't think there's any simple representation in the brain of those two systems because what I've called System 1 operation because of its characteristics includes bothinnate responses as highly skilled responses.

And the entire representation of world knowledge is in System 1. Therefore, it is difficult to classify one as primitive. And I should add that System 2, the reasoning system, if you will, is not necessarily rational. I mean, System 2 knows what it knows. He knows what we know and we don't know much. So it's not that System 2 is infallible and that all errors come from System 1. We make very big mistakes when we think very seriously. Yes. Man #3: So you mention that when experts make long-term forecasts and trust their intuition they often make mistakes. But there are still many people who listen to them.

So is it bad for society at large that we listen to experts who may be just as wrong as we are and should we worry? Should we try to do something? Kahneman: I think there is a very good reason for the demand for experts. I was referring to a particular book that you might want to read or look up the review of that book in the New Yorker. It's a book by Phil Tetlock on impeachment where he studied forecasts in the 10 to 15 year time range of political forecasts. And one of the interesting observations is who are the people that we like to listen to as experts?

And there are very confident people who believe they understand the world. Now, they are actually worse than chance. I mean, they are worse than people who doubt more. But we love them. We need them. And that's why there is a real demand for overconfidence. Man #5: While you were going through all the slides of the various illusions, when you got to the three figures on the screen, I guess I was hoping there would be something. So even though the lot on the right seemed larger, I took a good look again and they are the same. So was System 1 or System 2.

Kahneman: That's clearly System 2. And that's the way we can learn to overcome both visual and cognitive illusions. You still see one bigger than the other, but you know that when you see a screen like that, you shouldn't trust your eyes. And similarly you can recognize that you are in a situation where someone is having too much of an effect on you because he is so articulate. But you know the content may not be there. And then, you force yourself to be skeptical. Man #5: Is there any research that indicates that people would take advantage of the fact that advertising will have an emotional effect on them?

Is there any solution? Let me say that I am aware that advertising is supposed to have an emotional effect on me and I activate System 1. Will I be better prepared to ignore those things? Kahneman: I mean you'll certainly ignore it better than if you didn't know, if you're able to ignore it completely, about that I'm much more skeptical. The real thing is not to expose yourself to it. Because once you are exposed to it, it will affect you. And you know, those effects are the signals in our world that we are not aware of and that can be extremely powerful.

There is a whole line of study, it is not exactly what you mean, but I must tell you that story. There is a whole line of studies on what happens to people when they are exposed to the idea of ​​money. And for example, they perform a task and there is a computer nearby and on the computer there is a screen saver and the screen saver is dollars floating in the water. Dollar bills floating in water. That makes you selfish. It makes you reluctant to ask for help from others. It makes you move your chair away from other people's chairs when you have to prepare for an interview situation.

It has effects on all kinds of behaviors that people are completely unaware of. And the links are symbolic. And you can be aware of it. How can you resist it? We are exposed to money and it is going to have some effect. Now, if you are designing an organization or if you are designing an environment for people, you can create an environment that reminds them of money all the time or you can create an environment that reminds them of other things and controls their behavior to some extent. Man #2: Although you may not yet be one of the Big Five in the personality trait categories, have you developed any empirical tests that rank people on a scale of one to two and show where they stand in terms of default behaviors?

Kahneman: Well, there is a relevant scale on System 2 activity. And the bat and ball question is actually a very, very good question. There are several examples of this. My former colleague Shane Frederick developed that test. It's called the Cognitive Reflection Test and the people who don't pass that item, that is, the ones who say dimes, are different in some interesting ways from the people who are better able to do it. And let me give you an example. You ask them, you know, standard Amazon questions. So you asked for a gift for yourself. How much will you pay extra to have it tomorrow instead of the second business day?

And people who fail in this item are willing to pay more to get it tomorrow. So there are connections. What there is not, and I am very surprised that there is not, I don't know, there should be intelligence tests that are tests of System 1. That are tests of the richness and subtlety of the model of the world that we have. have. All the intelligence tests we have are tests for System 2. They are reasoning tests. We don't have it and I wish someone would develop it and I hope someone does, but in fact we don't have it.

Man #6: Hello. This is kind of a two-part question. So do you think that people who are more System 1 or System 2 inclined to make immediate judgments are more likely to be more likely to make long-term, more important decisions? Kahneman: I don't know enough about this. Man #6: Yes. Kahneman: We know that self-control and general activation of System 2 is an important personality characteristic. And it is known that its presence in a rudimentary form at the age of four has implications. The test skill is called The Marshmallow Test. You ask a child if you can have one marshmallow now or two if you wait 15 minutes.

That predicts remarkably well what they'll do 20 years later, so there are things that are pretty stable. Man #6: And the other part is, have you come across people who would say they have to make a decision and they are aware that their System 1 mind is telling them decision A and their System 2 mind is telling them saying decision B? What do people go with? Kahneman: I don't know enough. Man #6: No? Kahneman: No, I don't know enough. No, I don't know enough. It would depend a lot on the circumstances whether the judgment of System 2 prevails. In many cases, in reality System 2 simply endorses what System 1 defers to.

That's the model you have. Sometimes you can reverse it. It is hard work. Thank you.