이 인터뷰는 연구소에서 진행하는 역사와의 대화(Conversations with History) 시리즈의 일부이며, 지식에 관한 글로벌 포럼으로써 인터넷을 통해 버클리의 우수성(distinction)을 대중과 공유하고자 한다.역사와의 대화에 오신 것을 환영합니다. 저는 국제학 연구소의 해리 크라이슬러입니다. 오늘 모실 분은 프린스턴대 심리학과 교수이며 우드로 윌슨 스쿨(Woodrow Wilson School)에서 공공 및 국제문제에 관해 심리학과 공무(Public Affairs)를 강의하고 있는 다니엘 카너먼(Daniel Kahneman)입니다. 2002년에 아모스 트베르스키(Amos Tversky)와 인간의 판단과 의사결정에 관한 공동연구로 노벨 경제학상을 수상했습니다. 전 심리학 교수인 그는 2007년 봄, UC 버클리대의 히치콕 강연자 였습니다. (UC버클리대 심리학과 교수로 역임하신 아모스 트베르스키는 2007년 버클리대 올해의 교수로 뽑히기도 했습니다.)

"역사와의 대화"에 오신 것을 환영합니다. 저는 국제학 협회의 해리 크라이슬러 교수이고, 오늘 우리가 초청한 분은 프린스턴 대학교의 심리학과 교수이며 우드로 윌슨 스쿨(Woodrow Wilson School)에서 공공 및 국제문제에 관해 공무(Public affairs) 심리학을 강의하고 계신 대니얼 캐너먼 교수님입니다. 2002년에 아모스 트베르스키와 함께 인간의 판단과 의사결정에 관한 공동연구로 노벨 경제학상을 수상하셨습니다. 버클리의 전 심리학 교수로서 2007년 봄에 히치콕 강의도 맡으셨습니다. 
 
Kahneman교수님, Berkeley대학으로 다시 돌아오신 걸 환영합니다. 
감사합니다. 
교수님은 어디서 태어나셨습니까? 
저는 Tel Aviv에서 태어났는데, 당시엔 팔레스타인이었죠. 그리고 저는 팔레스타인까지 돌아오기 전, 12살까지 프랑스에서 자랐습니다. 
돌이켜보면, 교수님의 세계관에 부모님이 어떤 영향을 주신 것 같습니까? 
저는 유대인 집안에서 자라났는데, 어떻게 보면 저희 어머니가 아버지보다 제 세계관 형성과 더 관계가 있으시다고 말씀드릴 수 있습니다. 제 아버지는 연구원으로 바쁘셨으나, 어머니께서는 확실히 제 발전에 영향을 주셨습니다. 그녀는 사람들과 문자(문학)에 매우 관심이 많으셨습니다. 저는 자연이나 동물에는 관심이 없었고, 어린 나이부터 인문학에 매료되었습니다. 
교수님께서는 전쟁당시 프랑스, 유럽에 계셨죠. 제가 생각할 때 그 경험은 교수님의 가치관에 큰 여파를 남겼을 것 같습니다. 어떤가요? 
의심의 여지가 없지요. 그 경험이 없었다면 지금의 제 모습도 없을 것이라고 생각합니다.저는 평범한 아이들이라면 겪을 수 없었을 많은 일을 겪었습니다만, 저와 같은 세대 대부분의 아이들보다는 운이 좋았다고 말씀드릴 수 있죠. 
교수님께서는 노벨상 수상 이후에 쓰신 자서전에서 어릴 때 집으로 돌아오는 길에 겪었던 한 사건을 언급하셨죠? 괜찮으시다면 그 얘기 좀 다시 해주시겠어요? 굉장히 감명 깊었었거든요. 
유대인 통행금지 시간이 있었던 41년도 즈음이었습니다. 저희는 유대인 심벌이 박힌 옷을 입어야 했고, 제 생각에 오후 6시가 통행금지 시간이었던 것 같습니다. 저는 초등학교 1학년이나 2학년이었고, 친구와 놀다가 그만 집에 갈 시간을 놓쳐버렸지요. 그래서 저는 스웨터를 뒤짚어서 입고 집을 향해 걸어갔습니다. 사람이 없는 횡횡한 길을 걸어 가던 중 저는 한 독일군인이 저를 향해 걸어오는 것을 보았습니다. 그는 검정생 제복을 입고 있었고 저는 이것이 좋은 징조가 아니라는 사실을 알고 있었습니다. 그것은 SS의 제복이었죠. 우리는 서로를 향해 걷고 있었는데, 거리가 가까워지는 어느 지점에서 그가 저를 보고 손짓을 하기 시작했습니다. 저는 그에게 다가갔고, 그는 저를 들어올려 안아주었습니다. 저는 그가 제 스웨터 안에 Star of David(유대인임을 나타내기 위해 옷에 의무적으로 박아야 했던 상징모양)를 볼까봐 겁에 질렸습니다. 그리고 그는 저를 내려놓고 지갑을 꺼내 한 남자 아이의 사진을 보여주고, 저에게 약간의 돈을 주었습니다. 이 중요한 사건은 저에게 사물의 복잡성을 일깨워 주었습니다. 저는 히틀러가 꽃을 좋아하고 아기들을 사랑한다는 이야기를 듣고 감명 받았던 때를 기억합니다. 이를 기점으로 저는 7살, 8살 나이의 꼬마아이로서, 악(惡)의 복잡성에 대해 많은 생각을 하게 되었습니다.. 
돌이켜보면, 그 상황에서 조직의 명령을 따르는 이성적인 사람이 취했을 행동에 대한 기대가 어긋났기 때문인 것 같네요. 
그렇지 않습니다. 다른 상황에서는 비인간적일 수 있는 그가 보인 행동이 인류애를 보여주었기에 그 순간의 복잡성에 대한 생각이었죠. 그는 한 아버지이기도 했지만 자식과 함께 할 수 없는 외로운 아버지이기도 했습니다. 그리고 저는 곧 깨달았지요. 그가 저를 보고 그의 아들을 생각했다는 것을요. 
 
전쟁 후에 당신과 어머님은 이스라엘로 이민을 가셨죠. 
그렇습니다. 
이스라엘에 가는 기회를 가졌던 것과, 그 당시 이스라엘이 형성되던 시기의 역사에 대한 어떤 기억이... 
음, 그건, 저에게 있어서, 크나큰 이득이었죠.

Background 
Professor Kahneman, welcome back to Berkeley.  
Thank you. 
Where were you born and raised? 
I was born in Tel Aviv, which was then Palestine, and I was raised in France until the age of twelve, when we went back to Palestine. 
Looking back, how do you think your parents shaped your thinking about the world? 
I grew up in a Jewish environment and my mother had more to do with shaping my view of the world, in some ways, than my father. My father was a researcher, but my mother certainly influenced my development. She was very interested in people and I lived in a world that consisted of people and words, really. I was never very interested in nature and animals, but people and words I was really fascinated by from an early age. 
You were in Europe, in France, during the war. I would imagine that experience really had an impact on your thinking, or did it? 
Undoubtedly it shaped me. I don't know what I would've been without that experience, but certainly I went through a lot of experiences more fortunate children don't have, and I was luckier than most of the children of my generation in that place in the world. 
You describe in your official autobiography of the Nobel laureate an incident when you were coming home once. Would you mind retelling that story? Because it's quite fascinating. 
It must have been the fall of '41, when there was a curfew for Jews. We were also supposed to be wearing a yellow star, and there was a curfew which I think was 6:00 PM. I was in first or second grade and I'd gone to play with a friend and I was going home and I missed the curfew, I was late. And so, I turned my sweater inside out and walked home, and as I was coming close I remember the street was deserted and there was this German soldier walking towards me. He was wearing the black uniform and I knew that was not good. That was the uniform of the SS. We were walking towards each other and as we were coming close he sort of beckoned me, and of course I went there, and he picked me up and hugged me. I remember being terrified that he would see the Star of David inside my sweater. Then he put me down and took out his wallet and showed me a picture of a boy and gave me some money. That's a formative memory because of what it meant about the complexity of things. I remember being very fascinated at the time by this and by stories of Hitler liking flowers and kissing babies. The complexity of evil was much on my mind as a seven- or eight-year-old. 
I guess in retrospect, the expectation about what somebody like that would do if he were rational and following the orders of his organization. 
No, it was more the complexity of the moment, the basic humanity of the fellow who was clearly quite capable of being inhumane at other times, and I think already knew this, but was a father and a lonely father and with a boy, and I reminded him of the boy, and I knew that immediately. 
After the war, you and your mother emigrated to Israel. 
Indeed. 
Any memories from that experience of having that chance to go to Israel and be there during that very formative period in Israel's [history]? 
Well, that was, for me, an enormous [benefit], because I was lucky, I was held up a year. I had been, you know, quite Jewish and feeble in athletics and a bit precocious intellectually, and so on. And in Israel everything was different. I had basically a normal adolescence, and I was very grateful for that. The period, of course, was a very exciting period. We went there in '46 -- actually, I think we arrived the day of the famous bombing of the King David Hotel, which was an important event in history. Then in '48 there was the war, and in '51 I started my studies, and in '54 I went into the army, so it was all quite compressed in time. 
You were educated at Hebrew University? 
Yes, indeed. 
And what was your major? 
Psychology, and my minor was mathematics. 
Then you went into the army and became a researcher. Talk a little about that. 
First, actually, I spent a year, which probably in many ways was at least as important, as a platoon commander, which was quite -- you know, things change you. And then I was a psychologist. It was a period when there was no psychology department. The professor of psychology had been killed in the 1948 war and there was nothing. The head of the psychological research unit was a chemist. He was completely self-taught. But the place was full of brilliant people and there was a lot of very good work being done. I was, as it were, the best trained psychologist. I had a BA which I proudly acquired in, I think, two years, and I was the best trained psychologist there, and I did a number of things that had a big influence on my development later. One of the things I did do that I'm still quite proud of is I set up an interviewing system for the Israeli army to interview recruits for combat units. I learned in 2002 [that] that interview is still in place, fifty years later. They have barely changed it, in fact. So, I had many experiences that were formative in terms of my subsequent research on judgment. 
Let's talk about that interview. The problem before you was to match the skill set with the requirements of the job. Talk a little about that, and your thought processes. Here you are, a young person with only a BA, and yet you're putting in place a formula that works ... 
That's a bit of history of my field in psychology. In 1954 Paul Miel published a very important book in which he showed that clinicians are much less good at what they're doing than they think they are, and that their ability to forecast events and psychological behavior in the future is really quite limited. I have no memory of reading the book but I must have read it because what I did was completely compatible with it. I don't think I could do it much better today. I set up an interview that didn't leave a lot of room for clinical intuition on the part of the interviewer. The interviewer went through a script and found out what the person had done as a civilian, basically. It turns out that when you use that information to produce ratings of various strengths, you get ratings that are predictive and are useful on whether somebody is responsible, or appreciates manliness, or is sociable, things like that. In addition, it turned out (and this was important to me years later) that when people had acquired that information, then their clinical judgment was, in fact, good, whereas if they were trying to form a clinical impression [without a script] they couldn't do it. 
These observations that I made at that time became quite essential to my research about fifteen years later and they were central to the work that ultimately led to the Nobel Prize. So, it started quite early, by accident. 
Being a Psychologist  
I'm interested in exploring with you the skills of a psychologist; in other words, this interface between skill set and the requirements of the discipline. Talk a little about that because students often want to know what it takes to do [a job that they] want to do. 
You must enjoy observing things, and that must be true for people who do zoology or biology. You must enjoy observing other things. I like observing people. And probably for a psychologist it also helps a lot to examine yourself. So, I think many of the best ideas that I've had have come from examining events in my life, and examining how I respond to events in my life. And so, that's been a source of ideas -- "inspiration" is too big a word, but certainly a source of ideas. 
What you learn in the course of a career is not to ask questions that are so big that there are no answers to them. You look for questions that can be answered, but you look for questions that have a twist to them, that are somehow interesting. I've been lucky. I've had a few of those. 
I think of research as a conversation, and it really is very much like a conversation. No single person dominates it, but what does happen is when you interject something, when you contribute something to a conversation, you want to be understood, you want to be heard, you would like people to pay attention, you would like it to have some influence on the way the conversation goes. You don't control it. But thinking in conversational terms and trying to say something that is interesting as a criteria, not merely publishable but actually is interesting -- that's been part of what moved me. 
As I listen to you talk, I have a sense of an element of humanity in your research design. The Jewish expression would be zeichel, that part of what you've done in your work is to find simple questions that then open up the conversation. Is that fair? 
I think it's fair. I was drawn to a particular kind of research, but actually I was inspired by research that I read as a very young professor. I read work by a very famous psychologist, Walter Mischel, and I read his thesis, I think it must have been in 1964, and in his thesis he had asked children a single question -- I think he had two questions but one was, "There is that fairy or magician who can make of you whatever you want to be. What do you want to be?" If they said a profession or some trade that has to do with achievement it was scored one, otherwise zero. He would give them two lollypops, a large one and a small one, and he would say, "You can have this one now or that one tomorrow." It turned out that the answers of those two children predicted everything in sight. I was enormously impressed by that, and I call that the psychology of single questions, and it turned out to be an ideal for me, of doing research about single questions, of having single examples. A few years later I was fortunate enough to be able to do the psychology of single questions and I have largely kept to that, kept to very simple points, making very simple points. 
Collaborating with Amos Tversky  
An important theme in your work is your collaboration with Amos Tversky. You've talked quite a bit about that in your autobiography for the Nobel Prize. It was very fascinating. I'd like to talk a little about that because it was a friendship in which the conversation had great depth between the two of you and then really impacted the field. Talk a little about the elements of that relationship. 
We're both very lucky in a way, but I certainly considered myself extraordinarily lucky. We were close enough so we understood each other very well and we also had complementary skills. I'm more intuitive than he was. He was renowned for his clarity -- just incredible clarity, and the ability to see the big picture. I'm more of an intellectual fumbler but I dig fairly deep, and I also have wild flights of fancy. The combination of those two, of his characteristics and mine, and the fact that we just got along very well and had enormous respect for each other, and that we enjoyed each other's company -- I think we knew it. We had, jointly, a mind that was better than our separate minds. Our joint mind was very, very good. I'm not embarrassed to say that. It was much better than mine. So, we did very good work that way. 
There was something in the dynamic that is especially interesting to me, which is that when you think on your own as a scientist, as a researcher, it sometimes takes years before you understand what you're saying. You first say something, you write it, it can be published, and only years later you say, "Oh, I really said that. It was there, it was in my mind." When there are two of you conversing, that process is short circuited. Really, it's quite dramatic. So, I would say vague things and Amos would hear them and he would see what I meant much more clearly than I had when I said it. That was part of the secret of our success, that together, through that process of understanding each other better than the speaker had understood himself, we could make a lot of progress. We also had infinite patience. And we enjoyed spending six hours a day together. 
At one point you say that you would have a thought and he could finish it, basically? 
When you spend six hours a day with someone for a number of years, we knew each other's jokes, and of course, we could finish each other's thoughts. But we kept surprising each other, so it often was enough. We became very efficient, I think. 
You used the term "conversation," this is a subset of that. Before we talk about the research that you got the prize for, there's an intriguing element in your story, which is you're a psychologist and you won the prize for economics. What are your thoughts about the fact that you were working in one discipline and were recognized [in another]? Disciplines always have boundaries that want to limit the conversation, but then the power of what you were saying not only affected psychology but also economics. That was unique, in a way. Talk a little about that. 
In the first place, the element of luck was considerable in that development. It really didn't have to be that way. There was luck at several stages. There was something that Amos and I did together which had something to do with the psychology of single questions, which caused many people to pay attention to our work. We published our questions that explored flaws in human intuitive thinking, but our questions were simple and each one made a point, and they were part of the articles we published. That turned out to be quite important to what happened to us, because the readers would read this and then the errors were not the errors of somebody else, you know, some subjects [whom we had interviewed]. They knew, they could recognize in themselves, that "Oh, yes, this is the way my mind works." This was almost part of our rhetoric, not of the substance, but the rhetoric was very effective. So, we had economists paying attention to our work early on. 
Then when we worked on decision making, which was the second thing we did together, we published the theory paper in Econometrica, which is the prestige theory journal in economics. We were not intending to influence economics at all. It was just the best journal for that kind of article. If we had published exactly the same article in Psychological Review it would not have got the Nobel Prize, it [would have been seen as] a trivial detail. If we'd had a hostile referee in Econometrica we would have gone to Psych Review, but the big event that caused the prize is that some economists were interested, particularly an economist who's now my closest friend, Richard Thaler, who became interested in our work. He is the one who both taught me economics and brought these ideas into economics for their behavioral [value.] 
So, it's because of the work of economists that I got the prize. I didn't get the prize for work that Amos and I did just because it was very good work. We got the prize (or I got the prize, because he couldn't share in it) because it had an impact on economics; but the impact was because people in economics saw it was relevant. They were a minority of people, and they did brilliant work. 
Does this tell us anything about new ideas and disciplines, a general proposition that innovation maybe sometimes has to come from outside? 
What I learned was something I [already] knew. 
Amos Tversky and I were approached by the person who is now the president of the Russell Sage Foundation, Eric Wanner, very early in the 1980s, twenty-five years ago. He asked us what could be done to bring psychology and economics together. I said this was not a project on which we could spend a lot of money, honestly, and I told him that there was absolutely no point in encouraging psychologists to influence economics, but that if there were economists who were interested he should support them. Indeed, two years later, Richard Thaler, whose name I mentioned, came to spend a year with me in Vancouver and we had a glorious year and we published a number of articles together, some of them quite important, actually, and that was the beginning of behavioral economics. 
Looking back, what comments would you like to make about creativity? From what we've just talked about, is there a point to be made that would help us understand that? We've talked about collaboration, we've talked about research design, and then this funny set of information or thinking passing from one discipline to another. 
People have very different tastes. Intellectually they have different tastes and different skill sets, and so on. I know where my ideas come from and pretty much what characterizes them. They're very simple. I tend to see simple things. Sometimes I see simple things that other people haven't seen before, but I don't see very complicated things. Other people are better at seeing complicated things. So, there are different kinds of creativity, and together with Tversky we had a range of possibilities because he was creative in different ways than I was. 
Intuitive Thinking  
Let's talk a little now about your research. I know that [the Nobel] prize is built on a whole body of research, but I think it would be useful for our audience to understand the very simple ideas, if I can use your words, that had such power and such impact. In your lecture you said the mind is a system of jumps to conclusions, and you're looking at one piece of that. 
Yes. What we studied was intuitive thinking in the domain of judgment under uncertainty, this is how we started. That is, how do people assess the probabilities of events and how do they forecast the future intuitively? And our idea is that people use heuristics, which are basically shortcuts. In my lecture -- it's a phrase I coined this week but I'm going to use it -- I did speak of the mind as a machine for jumping to conclusions. We figured out some of the ways that this is done, and I think the most important one that we studied in the first years of our work was something that I now call substitution. That is, you're asked a difficult question, you cannot answer it, but another answer comes to mind, and it's an answer to a related question which is simpler. Without being aware of it you substitute the answer for the simple question in place of the answer to the complicated one. This is how lay people and non-experts come up with intuitions about very complicated problems that baffle experts. Some of these intuitions are good, others are not so good, but that's the machinery. So, that was the first part of our work on judgment, developing that idea and fleshing it out. 
As your thinking about these issues has developed over time you're focusing on perception, intuition, and cognition. Or perception, emotion, and cognition. 
The period when we were working was the heyday of what is called the "cognitive revolution." At the time, psychologists were engaged in exploring the mysteries of cognition, and we were no exception. One novel aspect of what we were doing was that we imported the notion of illusion from perception into cognition. We showed that people make errors of intuitive thinking that have many of the characteristics of illusions. That was because I was teaching perception at the time, this was what filled my mind. The analogy of visual perception and how it helps inform how we think about intuition has been very important in my thinking all the way through. I have explored this idea in particular over the last five or six years. 
Talk a little about what you call "System One," intuition. People realize they do the sorts of things you're describing, but the description that has developed is [balanced by] what you call "System Two," which is rationality. 
This is something that has become explicit in my mind only recently. One of the things we learn is that some ideas are taken for granted. For example, when we worked we took rationality [as a given], that people are able to compute correct answers to problems. That did not need explaining, so we were not looking at that. We were looking at mistakes, but when the field accepted the notion of mistakes, then it became a challenge. People are sometimes able to figure things out and to do it correctly [and sometimes not]. 
The resolution of that, which I think is becoming widespread -- it's not original to me, it is generally accepted in psychology -- is that there are those two families of mental processes. I call them (along with others, it's not my term either) System One and System Two, one of which is intuitive, rapid, associative, uncontrolled, automatic thinking, and the other the rule-governed [approach], the way you fill your income tax form, or compute 17 times 24, or read a map. We're able to think in this [rule-governed] way, but most of the time we run on the software of System One, that is, automatically and with little thought, and by and large with remarkable success and accuracy. 
In an interview you said that with fear, probability does not matter as much. The more emotional the event, the less sensible people are. 
This is a development of the last ten or fifteen years. The cognitive revolution is now over and what is happening in the field is that emotion is now being [studied]. The views of decision making have changed, and in a way they're going back to what was common sixty, seventy, eighty years ago, that is, the idea that there are very important conflicts between reason and passion. Nobody was thinking along those lines twenty years ago, but many people are thinking along those lines today. One of the attributes that are constantly being evaluated by System One is the emotional significance of events. So, we're continuously evaluating whether things are good or bad or safe or threatening, and so on. Our emotional responses guide us, and our emotional responses guide the ideas that come to our minds. 
I read that very important to your work is the way one defines a problem, in the area of risk and loss, for example. Your thinking, as I understand it, opened up our understanding of how people perceive risk and loss in economic decision making, because previously the focus had been just on wealth, the entire fortune that was at stake. 
Again, it's a very simple idea. It is true that for 300 years the focus in the analysis of financial decisions, of decisions about money, has been about wealth. People have talked about the "utility" of wealth, which is the psychological response to wealth and [the way] that people [judge] different prospects and opportunities by evaluating them in terms of what is called finite states of wealth. When I started studying this field under the tutelage of Amos Tversky (it was not my specialty), I was struck by the absurdity of it, and I was stuck by the fact that this is not the way that people think about risk. They think about risk in terms of gains and losses, that you don't know what wealth you have. It turns out that that is a very fundamental reorganization of the field, to think of outcomes in terms of gains and losses and not in terms of final states. So, it opened up a whole agenda that people are still working out. 
So, narrowing the focus by having an intuition about the way people are (or the way you are, as you said), is central to what's going on in your work. 
There are several stages to this. This idea of gains and losses and that people evaluate changes -- I distinctly remember how I had that idea. I was reading a chapter in a book that Amos Tversky [had co-authored], and it was a chapter on how people analyze decisions. Many important philosophers had been analyzing the so-called utility function for money, and I noticed that they never asked people about wealth. They said, "What about a gamble in which you could win this amount with a certain probability, or that amount for sure?" They didn't do losses much, it was all about changes. 
I came back to Amos and I said, "Hey, what's going on here? They are asking questions about this and then they're plotting a function in terms of that. That is psychologically very implausible." 
So, you know, you need to be able to pay attention to this, and then you need to realize that it's important. 
On that very day it was obvious that we would never look at wealth again, that we were going to do something that is psychologically realistic, because he was immediately convinced. Somebody else had had that idea before, but they hadn't followed through with it, and we did. 
So, you need a very simple idea and then you need to see that it's important. Then you need to follow through. It's a combination of tools. 
Does your research offer insights to individuals with regard to how they might change their own behavior? 
Yes, potentially it does, but they are not insights that are very easy to use. You can be aware of mistakes you make, [but] it's very difficult to learn to avoid them, because System One operates automatically. Occasionally when a decision is very important, then you can stop to think, and you have to recognize that you can stop to think. And then there is still the extra stage, which is a very painful and difficult stage, [where] even if your analysis tells you to do something, you don't want to do it. To impose the discipline of rationality on your desires is extremely difficult. I've just lived something like this in deciding whether or not to write a book: I just want to do it. When I analyze the pros and cons it's absurd for me to do this, but I'm going to do it, I think. So, you know, it's very difficult to impose discipline on yourself. 
Successes and Failures of Intuition  
In your lecture you talked about individuals -- a fireman, a nurse -- who develop an intuition that is critical to their career. They're able to see things. Talk a little about that. You are approaching the question of how a person develops and masters their intuition. 
One of the important developments in recent years in my life has been [that] I try to understand controversy and I try to reduce controversy. Amos Tversky and I made our reputation by finding flaws in what people do. It was the method we used. It's not that we ever thought that people are stupid, but this is what we were doing. Many people have responded to that by saying that we're drawing a distorted picture of human nature. 
One of the people who responded to that is Gary Klein, the guru of a movement that is called Naturalistic Decision Making. They're very interested in intuition and deliberately skeptical about the kind of work that we've done. I approached him because I liked his work, actually, and we've been collaborating on an article, so I was citing in my lecture examples from his work on professional intuitions. There's a fireman, a captain of a firefighting company, on the roof suddenly yelling to his company, "Let's get out of here!," just before the house explodes, and then it turns out he wasn't aware of when he was doing it, but his feet were warm and that was the cue that triggered the sense that something very dangerous was going on just underneath them. That's a beautiful example of a perfect intuition, and that's the kind of thing that has been feeding people who think that all our discussions on biases and mistakes are overstated. 
So, it sets a very interesting problem that Gary Klein and I have been trying to sort out together. When do intuitions develop and when don't they? Which experts can you trust and which experts shouldn't you trust? 
You say that skills are acquired in an environment of feedback and opportunity for learning in a social network. That would help us understand what makes it possible for [professional intuition] to be [successful]. 
They think about situations a lot and they talk about things a lot, so they develop models of various kinds of files. They don't have to experience -- you know, we are capable of learning a great deal from simulated experience. Even athletes can learn from simulating things in their minds, and they do: they practice a lot at night without doing anything. This is one piece of machinery that we dispose of. It will not help you in certain domains; it's not something that a CIA analyst can do, because the systems that they deal with are fundamentally more complicated. 
Which raises the interesting question of how groups can learn from their own experience. Your work is related to decision making in the marketplace, and in a minute we'll talk about your article in Foreign Policy. In those cases, what is the difference when you have institutions and groups that would like to correct these kinds of errors? 
Well, in the first place, my main observation would be that groups, by and large, do not correct errors. That's [from] recurrent observations. There's a lot of lip service paid in organizations about improving the quality of our intelligence and the quality of our decision making but I think it's mainly lip service, because imposing a discipline on decision making, as I illustrated by my example of the book -- you know, I don't want to impose discipline on my decision making, and the leaders of organizations -- civilian and governmental and commercial -- don't like to be second-guessed. It's the rare leader -- [although] there are very salient examples; the Cuban missile crisis is the example that people think about, where President Kennedy developed a deliberating team that was superbly efficient in allowing dissent and in allowing ideas and slowing down the process of decision making to a rate that was appropriate to the complexity of the situation. That's very rare. 
In some domains, for example politics, the name of the game becomes not to do what the other party did and how they learned. Recently you had an article in Foreign Policy applying your analysis to foreign policy decision making, which is pessimistic in the sense that it suggests that hawks have a structural advantage. The choices that they lean toward, whatever the issue, fall into many of the [biases] that you've identified in individual decision making. 
That's right. I think it's significant; I think it's probably true. I didn't expect to see this, but when I made a list of the biases of human thinking and decision making it turned out that in a situation of conflict, when conflict is about to develop or arise, these biases consistently favor hawks over doves. So that the claims of hawks would resonate with emotions and beliefs, and things that people want to believe, more than the claims of doves. That was the point of that article. 
In fact, there's an optimistic bias, "We have all of this military hardware, let's do it," and an illusion of control, "We can go in there and by defeating the adversary we can then take control." 
Whenever you look at a serious conflict or a war it's very clear that there was enormous optimism, usually on both sides. It's not only the losing side that was optimistic, the winning side didn't appreciate the costs. And that, I think, is regularly true. It's very difficult to think of a conflict in which anybody had any idea when it began how bad it was going to be for both sides. Almost by definition you get optimism on both sides of every conflict, and when conflict arises I think the tendency [is that] pessimism becomes [interpreted as] disloyalty, doubting our ability to achieve victory. It would take a very, very strong national leader to be able to sustain some doubter in his inner circle when he himself wants to move forward. 
And unfortunately, in terms of where we are now, it's difficult to cut losses. I know that if one has a mutual fund that has not done well one doesn't want to move it for fear that you will lose even more by rationally moving it, so ... 
People in general don't like cutting their losses. They're willing to gamble on in the hope of recovering their losses, and that is a very well known characteristic of individual decision making, and in national decision making it's exacerbated because the national leaders who have led the country close to defeat, for them there is really nothing further to be lost by putting more at risk. There is a real divergence of interest between national leaders and their communities when the time to cut losses arises, because cutting losses is rarely beneficial to the decision maker. 
Conclusions  
I would be interested in your reflections on human nature, because you've devoted a whole career to looking at the quirks of our personalities, the blind spots in our rational thinking. Have you ended up in the same place that you started with? You started, you said, with complexity: the interaction with the soldier in the streets of Paris, there was complexity. Is that where you still are, and has anything come out of your research that has informed you of human nature? 
There are different intellectual styles, so there are some people who summarize their world and can summarize it in one big idea. That's not the way my mind works. I think there is some coherence in my view of the way people work, but I have built things one brick at a time and I don't think I have a simple summary. I can, in general, find pretty good arguments to reject any simple idea about human nature, but it's not that I have a simple idea of my own to substitute for it. So, in that sense, yes, complexity is my message. 
If students were to watch this program, do you have any advice for them about how they should prepare for their future if, for example, they want to go into the field of psychology? 
My main advice would be to look at the natural traps that await anybody who does research. One of the real traps is to get trapped by a research program that is fundamentally uninteresting, and also, the reluctance to cut your losses so that when you've done something that is not very interesting, wasting time trying to publish it is almost always a big mistake, at least in my judgment. Look for things that are worth doing and discard things that don't work, and know that if you're reasonably good at what you're doing, and otherwise you shouldn't be in that profession, but if you're reasonably good at it, then ideas are a dime a dozen. You'll get lots of ideas. You need some ideas that work and that keep you excited and that you can do something with. And so, not getting stuck on an idea that doesn't work, but looking for other ideas -- that would be my general advice. That certainly has been how I've operated. 
At the end of your autobiography you go back to your relationship with Amos Tversky, and you quote him, and I thought these were both very interesting comments. You say, "But the other side of freedom is the ability to find joy in what one does and the ability to adapt creatively to the inevitable." And you go on to tell us that he often said, "Let us take what the terrain gives." 
This was a graveside eulogy for Tversky when he died in 1996, so that's the context. So, adapting to the inevitable, I was commenting on how he managed his death, which was really exemplary. He did quite extraordinary things in managing his dying. "Let's take what the terrain gives" was the expression of his wisdom as a researcher in his latter years, and it's the idea that you cannot define in advance the problem that you're going to solve. If you decide that "I'm going to solve this problem," you're not going to do it. What you do is, you are in that area and you do the best you can, you take what the terrain gives, and you adapt to what it is that you can find out and you don't try to force your ideas on nature. You're guided by what is achievable. 
It's very good advice to some people; it was very good advice for him, better than for me, for example. But that was his intellectual style. 
You mentioned that you might do another book. Is there a piece of research, an agenda that you still want to pursue in that space? 
I've been working the last ten, twelve years on issues of well being and experience and measuring experience, and the book that I'm thinking about is actually a trade book. I don't know if it will happen at my age, you never know. But it would cover the main topics that I've worked on, because I've given a lot of public lectures and I like taking to lay audiences, and in general I like thinking simply about the things I do. And so, I thought it would be a good opportunity to put things together. 
Do your insights about intuition apply? Are they a useful foundation for understanding what makes this happen? 
No. There is a lot in common because there are certain mistakes that we make in anticipating what will and will not make us happy, and these mistakes are very well understood by the notion of substitution that I mentioned earlier. We make highly predictable errors in thinking about our future, about what makes us happy, about what makes other people happy. 
On that note, Professor Kahneman, I want to thank you very much for coming back to Berkeley and for appearing on our program. 
Thank you. 
And thank you very much for joining us for this Conversation with History.