Daniel Kahneman Doesn't Trust Your Intuition | Re:Thinking with Adam Grant

1. 0:00 – 0:56

   Why Kahneman rejects the “behavioral economist” label

   1. AGAdam Grant0:00

      Hey, Worklifers. It's Adam Grant. Season 4 is right around the corner, but today I wanted to share a special conversation in our Taken for Granted series. I'm talking to Daniel Kahneman. Danny won a Nobel Prize in economics. He's been named one of the most influential economists in the world, but he's not on board with that.

   2. DKDaniel Kahneman0:19

      Oh my God, no. [laughs] I am not a behavioral economist. I'm not any kind of economist.

   3. AGAdam Grant0:26

      Danny is one of the great psychologists of our time. Actually, of all time. You may have read his influential book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, and he has a new book, Noise, coming out later this spring with Cass Sunstein and Olivier Sibony. [upbeat music] This is Taken for Granted, my podcast with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist. My job is to think again about how we work, lead, and live. This conversation with Danny

2. 0:56 – 3:37

   A better societal goal than happiness: reducing misery

   1. AGAdam Grant0:56

      challenged one of my core beliefs about intuition. It also gave me a new way of thinking about which ideas are worth pursuing. Since Danny's an expert on decision-making, I thought I'd start by asking about what we're seeking in so many of our decisions. You've spent a lot of your career studying happiness and related topics, and really for the first time in my career, I started to wonder why are we so obsessed with happiness as psychologists? You know, I, I'm, I'm all for people leading enjoyable, satisfying lives, but if I had to choose, I would much rather have people focus on character, on, you know, trying to build their generosity, their integrity, their commitment to justice, their humility. And I wonder if you could talk to me a little bit about whether you think we've lost our way a bit and character has, [laughs] has been too little-

   2. DKDaniel Kahneman1:47

      Oh

   3. AGAdam Grant1:47

      ... in focus or too far in the background, or whether you think happiness deserves the attention it's gotten.

   4. DKDaniel Kahneman1:52

      Well, I think my focus would be neither happiness nor character. It would be misery. And, and I think that there is a task for society, um, to reduce misery, not to increase happiness. And when you think of reducing misery, you would be led into very different policy directions. You would be led into mental health issues. You would be led into a lot of other problems. So reducing misery would be my focus. Character and happiness or, or misery are not substitutes. The idea of which has been accepted both in the UK and in many other places, in quite a few other countries by now, is that the objective of society, the objective of policy should be increasing human welfare or human wellbeing in a, in a general way. I think that's a better objective for policy than increasing the quality of the population's character. I think it's a better objective. I think it's a, it's a more achievable objective, except I would not focus on the positive end. I would focus on the negative end, and I would say it is the responsibility of society to try to reduce misery, and let's focus on that. We speak of length and not of shortness, and we speak of happiness. The l- the dimension is labeled by its positive pole, and that's very unfortunate because actually increasing happiness and reducing misery are very different things.

3. 3:37 – 5:00

   Critique of positive psychology: changing feelings vs. changing conditions

   1. AGAdam Grant3:37

      I agree, and it's interesting to hear you say that reducing misery is more important than promoting happiness. In some ways, that feels like a critique of the positive psychology movement.

   2. DKDaniel Kahneman3:47

      It is.

   3. AGAdam Grant3:48

      And tell me a little bit more about why.

   4. DKDaniel Kahneman3:50

      Well, uh, I think the positive psychology movement has in some ways a deeply conservative position. That is, it says, "Let's accept people's condition as it is, and let's make people feel better about their unchanging condition." You know, there has been some critique of positive psychology along those lines. I'm not, uh, I'm not innovating here. But I think that focusing on changing circumstances, on dealing directly with misery is more important and is a worthier objective for society than making people feel better about their situation.

   5. AGAdam Grant4:34

      Yeah, I mean, I, I think it certainly tracks with how I think about in general bad being stronger than good and the alleviation of misery contributing more to the quality of people's lives than, you know, some degree of elevating of, of the amount of joy that they feel. But I also wonder at times if this is not a false dichotomy, that if you want to make people happy, it's awfully difficult to do that if you don't pay attention to the misery or suffering that they might experience.

4. 5:00 – 6:52

   Misery is concentrated: why happiness policies miss the real problem

   1. DKDaniel Kahneman5:00

      Well, actually, uh, we once did a study in which we, we were measuring how people feel. How much of the day are people in different states, positive or negative? And it turns out that people are in a positive state on average 80% of the time, more than 80% of the time. That is, on average, people are on the positive side of zero. Now, look at, say, the 10% of the time that people spend suffering overall. Most of the suffering is concentrated in about 10 to 15% of the population. So i- it actually is not the same people that you would make less miserable or happier. Those are different populations, and the question is: Where do you direct the, the weight of policy and what do you pay more attention to?

   2. AGAdam Grant6:06

      Very interesting. I like it. So you're, you're basically saying, look, if we have scarce resources, whether those are financial or time or energy, we wanna concentrate on the group of people who are suffering as opposed to those who might be languishing.

   3. DKDaniel Kahneman6:20

      Yeah. It seems to me that to some extent we have been trapped by a word. I mean, it's the word happiness, which seems to stand for the whole dimension. And, uh, and, and I think this is leading to some policies. Actually, it is failing to lead to policies that would, that would really be directed at, at increasing human wellbeing by decreasing misery.

5. 6:52 – 10:28

   Workplace wellbeing vs. engagement—and the workaholism nuance

   1. AGAdam Grant6:52

      Yeah, I think so too, and it's something I've thought about a lot at work, given, [laughs] given that the hat I wear most often is organizational psychologist. I feel like the, the obsession with employee engagement has really missed the mark. I don't go to work hoping that I'm gonna be engaged today, [laughs] right? I, I hope that I'm gonna have motivation and meaning and that I'm gonna have a sense of wellbeing. And I wonder if, if one of the effects that the pandemic has had on a lot of people and a lot of leaders in workplaces is to get them to recognize, you know what, we need to care about people's wellbeing and their lives, not just their engagement at work.

   2. DKDaniel Kahneman7:24

      Well, I thought that, you know, I'm not an expert, this is your field, not mine, but I thought that engagement has... is close to feeling good at work. I mean, we- whether it's the responsibility of, of workplaces to deal with people's wellbeing in general, I agree that it's, they're responsible for dealing with people's wellbeing at work, and that doesn't seem to me to be very different from trying to make people engaged and happy with what w- they're doing. So I'm, I'd be curious to hear more about the dichotomy or the distinction that you're drawing between engagement and wellbeing. My interpretation of engagement was fairly close to wellbeing at work.

   3. AGAdam Grant8:14

      Yeah, I think, I think a, in large part it depends on which conceptualization and measure of engagement we're talking about. But one of the, one of the more interesting patterns in the literature that, that's gotten me thinking quite a bit is that [laughs] it's possible to be, uh, an engaged workaholic. Uh, and this, this has been differentiated recently from being a compulsive workaholic. You know, are you, are you working a lot because you find it interesting and worthwhile, or are you doing it because you feel, you know, guilty when you're not working and you feel kind of obsessed with the [laughs] with the problem that you're trying to solve? And I think that one version of engagement is probably healthier than the other, and I associate wellbeing much more with, you know, with being an intrinsically motivated workaholic, uh, than with a compulsive workaholic, even though both are highly engaged.

   4. DKDaniel Kahneman9:05

      I agree. Uh, you know, I worked for a while with Gallup. I was a consultant with Gallup many years ago, and their concept of engagement I think was a positive concept. One of the criteria that I remember for people being happy at work is having a friend at work. So, uh, clearly, at least their concept of engagement, which was the one that, the only one that I know much about, is by and large a positive concept. And certainly, uh, the word... We don't want people to be compulsive, although, although I don't know how to describe myself, for example, when, when I, I work hard or when I used to work very hard. Uh, was I doing so compulsively? Was I doing so out of intrinsic motivation? I think both. I was intrinsically motivated, and I was compulsive about it. So I'm not sure of the distinction that you're drawing between being compulsive and, uh, being intrinsically motivated.

   5. AGAdam Grant10:14

      Well, I like the call to look at ambivalence there because I think it, it speaks to the point that you raised earlier, [laughs] which is that, you know, positive emotions and negative emotions can coexist. You can work because you're passionate about it and because you feel bad if you're not doing it.

   6. DKDaniel Kahneman10:27

      That's right.

6. 10:28 – 12:30

   The joy of being wrong: learning through surprise

   1. AGAdam Grant10:28

      I wanna ask you about the joy of being wrong. The place I wanted to begin on this is to ask you, when you were growing up or earlier in your life, how did you handle making mistakes?

   2. DKDaniel Kahneman10:40

      I'm hesitating because I can't... It's not that I didn't make any mistakes, I certainly made many, but I wasn't very impressed by my mistakes. I mean, they were not very salient in my life. So if you're asking about my early, you know, as a student and so on, I don't have much to report that's of any interest. As a researcher, uh, I found my mistakes very instructive and, and they were sort of positive experiences by and large.

   3. AGAdam Grant11:08

      That's such an odd thing to hear you say because [laughs] most of us, most of us experience pain, not pleasure when, you know, when we find out that we're wrong or we discover that we've made a mistake. So how did you arrive at a place where you found that to be a teachable moment?

   4. DKDaniel Kahneman11:24

      Well, you know, s- those are situations in which you're surprised. I've really enjoyed changing my mind because I enjoy being surprised, and I enjoy being surprised because I feel I'm learning something. So that, that's, it's been that way. I've been lucky, I think, because I think you're right that this is not universal, the positive emotion to corrected mistakes, but it's just a matter of luck. I mean, I'm not, uh, you know, not claiming high moral ground here.

   5. AGAdam Grant11:59

      It's, it's fascinating to watch though because I've, I've seen your eyes light up and, you know, it's, it's, it's palpable, [laughs] right? When you, when you discover that you were wrong about a hypothesis or a prediction, uh, you, you look like you are experiencing joy. And I've started to, to think a lot about what prevents people from getting to that place. And I think a lot of it is for so many people, uh, they get trapped in either a preacher or a prosecutor mindset of saying, "You know, I,

7. 12:30 – 14:21

   Detaching identity from ideas: abundance mindset and knowing when to quit

   1. AGAdam Grant12:30

      I know my beliefs are correct," or, "I know other people are wrong." And at some point their ideas become part of their identity. And I know even scientists struggle with this, right? I think, uh, at least when I was trained as a social scientist, I was taught to be passionately dispassionate, but I know a lot of scientists who struggle with detachment, and you don't seem to. So how do you keep your ideas from, I guess, becoming part of your identity?

   2. DKDaniel Kahneman12:55

      Well, I think that... I mean, this is going to sound awful. I have never thought that ideas are rare. And, you know, if that idea isn't any good, then there is another that's going to be better. And, and I think that is probably generally true, but not generally acknowledged, so that for people to give up on an idea may f- in many cases lead to a sort of panic. "If I don't have that idea, then what do I have? Who am I i- if I don't have that idea?" So being less identified with your ideas is also associated, I think, with having many of them, dis- discovering that most of them are no good, and trying to, to do the best you can with the few that are good.

   3. AGAdam Grant13:45

      So it's, it's seeing ideas as abundant rather than scarce-

   4. DKDaniel Kahneman13:48

      That's right

   5. AGAdam Grant13:48

      ... that makes it easy to stay detached?

   6. DKDaniel Kahneman13:50

      Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I used to tell my students, "Ideas are a dime a dozen. I mean, don't over-invest in your old ideas." And so I, I used to encourage my students to give up at a certain point. I certainly never wanted to read a dissertation by a student with a chapter that would explain why their experiment failed. So that was, uh, the kind of advice that I would give them. Think of another idea.

8. 14:21 – 15:39

   When irrational persistence pays off—and why that doesn’t make it rational

   1. AGAdam Grant14:21

      Do you ever worry about getting too detached? I, I think, for example, about messenger RNA technology, which was seen as, I think, a, a joke for a long time [laughs] and if not for the courage and tenacity of a small group of scientists who persisted with it anyway, we might not have a COVID vaccine right now.

   2. DKDaniel Kahneman14:41

      Oh. [sighs] I think, well, in the first place, science, like many other social systems, um, doesn't thrive on everybody being the same. So, uh, you may have some advice that is good for some people, and it's clear that some people who are irrationally persistent achieve great successes. Uh, in- indeed, if you look back at great successes, you will generally find that there is some irrational persistence behind them and irrational optimism behind them. That doesn't mean that when you are looking from the other side, that irrational optimism or irrational, uh, persistence are, are good things to have. So the expected value of it might be negative, although when you look back, every big success you can trace to some irrationality.

9. 15:39 – 18:28

   Kahneman’s own biases, contrarian streak, and the coin-flip myth

   1. AGAdam Grant15:39

      Well, that goes beautifully to one of my favorite ideas of yours, that we look at successful people and we learn from their habits, not [laughs] realizing that we haven't compared them with people who failed who had many of the same habits. And I, I wanted to, I guess, ask you a broader question, which is, having put these kinds of decision heuristics and cognitive biases on the map, which one do you fall victim to the most? Is it confirmation bias? It sounds like maybe not. I, I just wondered which of, [laughs] which of the biases that you've documented is your greatest demon?

   2. DKDaniel Kahneman16:13

      All of them. Really, all of them-

   3. AGAdam Grant16:15

      [laughs]

   4. DKDaniel Kahneman16:15

      ... except, as you said, confirmation bias. By the way, people close to me find this irritating. That is that whenever they have a problem with someone, I automatically take the other side and try to explain why that someone might be right after all. So I have that contrarian, uh, aspect to, uh, what I am.

   5. AGAdam Grant16:38

      Oh, this, this m- reminds me a little bit of a [laughs] possibly apocryphal story that's, uh, I think told to, to every doctoral student in social science these days, which is that not long after you won the Nobel Prize for your work on decision-making, there was a journalist who asked you how you made tough decisions, and you said you flip a coin. Is this true?

   6. DKDaniel Kahneman16:59

      No.

   7. AGAdam Grant17:01

      Okay, good.

   8. DKDaniel Kahneman17:01

      Absolutely not.

   9. AGAdam Grant17:02

      I'm relieved.

   10. DKDaniel Kahneman17:02

       I've never flipped a coin to make a decision in my life.

   11. AGAdam Grant17:05

       Whew. The version of the story I heard was that you would flip the coin to observe your own emotional reaction and figure out what your biases were.

   12. DKDaniel Kahneman17:14

       I, I might have said that this is one of the benefits of flipping a coin, but I personally have never used it. But it's true that, you know, flipping a coin would be a way of discovering how you feel if you didn't know earlier. That I still believe.

   13. AGAdam Grant17:31

       I feel very relieved to know that, because I was worried about you, given all you know about decision-making, making [laughs] important life choices with a coin toss. [upbeat music] Welcome back to Taken for Granted and my conversation with Danny Kahneman. He was just setting the record straight that as an eminent scholar of decision-making, he does not make decisions based on a coin toss. So how does he make decisions?

10. 18:28 – 19:26

    Kahneman’s real decision style: strong intuitions—and a key distinction

    1. DKDaniel Kahneman18:28

       You know, when I look back at my life, uh, it's, there's been a series of things that, you know, ultimately I, I made decisions or I made life choices clearly, but I did not experience them as decisions. I have very little to say describing myself about making decisions, in part because I have pretty strong intuitions, and I follow them usually. So the decision doesn't feel hard if, if you know what you're going to do. And if you know yourself, and you're going to do it anyway, it doesn't feel very hard.

    2. AGAdam Grant19:11

       I have to say, Danny, I'm a little shocked to hear you say that you follow your intuition, because you have spent most of your career highlighting all the fallacies that come into play when we over-rely on our intuition.

11. 19:26 – 22:57

    Don’t eliminate intuition—delay it to prevent premature closure

    1. DKDaniel Kahneman19:26

       Well, uh, you really have to distinguish judgment from decision-making, and most of the intuitions that we've studied, uh, were fallacies of judgment rather than decision-making. And second, my attitude to intuition is not that I've spent my life, you know, uh, saying that it's no good. Uh, in, in the book that we're writing, that we've just finished writing, our advice is not to do without intuition. It is to delay it. That is, it is not to decide prematurely and not to have intuitions very early. If you can delay your intuitions, I think they're, they're your best guide probably about what you should be doing.

    2. AGAdam Grant20:17

       Okay, so two questions there. One is how, the other is why.

    3. DKDaniel Kahneman20:21

       Well, you delay your intuitions, uh, you know, and now I'm talking about formal decisions, decisions that might be taken within an organization or a decision that an interviewer might take in deciding whether or not to hire a candidate. And here the advice of delaying intuition is simply because when you have formed an intuition, you are no longer taking in information. You're just rationalizing your own decision or, or you're confirming your own decision. And there is a lot of research indicating that this is actually what happens in interviews, that interviewers spend a lot of time, they make their mind up very quickly, and they spend the rest of the interview confirming what they believe, which is really a waste of time.

    4. AGAdam Grant21:10

       Yes. Yes. So the idea of delaying your intuition is to make sure that you've gathered comprehensive, accurate, unbiased information so that then when your intuition forms, it's based on better sources, better data? Is that, is that what you're after?

    5. DKDaniel Kahneman21:27

       Yes, because I don't think you can make decisions without them being endorsed by your intuitions. You have to feel conviction. You have to feel that there is some good reason to be doing what you're doing. So ultimately, intuition must be involved. But if it's involved, if, if you jump to conclusions too early or jump to decisions too early, uh, then you're going to make avoidable mistakes.

    6. AGAdam Grant22:00

       Well, th-this is an interesting twist on, I guess, how I've thought about intuition, especially in a hiring context, but I think it applies to a lot of places. My, my advice for a long time has been, "Don't trust your intuition, test your intuition," because I think about intuition as, as subconscious pattern recognition, and I want to make those patterns conscious so I can figure out whether whatever relationship I've detected in the past is relevant to the present. And it, it seems like that's what, what you've argued as well when you've said, "Look, you know, you can trust your intuition if you're in a predictable environment, you have regular practice, and you get immediate feedback on your judgment." I, I think the tension for me here is I don't know how capable people are of delaying their intuition. And I wonder if, if what might be more practical is to say, "Okay, let's make your intuition explicit instead of implicit early on so that then you can rigorously challenge it and figure out if it's valid in this situation."

12. 22:57 – 25:45

    Israeli army interview system: structured ratings + final intuition wins

    1. DKDaniel Kahneman22:57

       I've been deeply influenced by something that I did very early, uh, in my career. I mean, when I was twenty-two years old, I set up an interviewing system for the Israeli army. It was to determine suitability for combat, uh, units. And the interview system that I designed broke up the problem so that you had six traits that you were interviewing about. You were asking factual questions about each trait at a time, and you were scoring each trait once you had completed the questions about that trait.

    2. AGAdam Grant23:35

       Jumping in here, because this is such a cool example, but it needs a little explaining. Danny created a system for interviewers to rate job candidates on specific traits, like work ethic, analytical ability, or integrity. But interviewers did not take it well.

    3. DKDaniel Kahneman23:50

       They really hated that system-

    4. AGAdam Grant23:52

       [laughs]

    5. DKDaniel Kahneman23:53

       ... when I introduced it. And they, they told me, I mean, I, I vividly remember one of them saying, "You're turning us into robots."

    6. AGAdam Grant24:01

       Danny decided to test which approach worked best. Was it their intuition or their ratings from the data? The answer was both, their ratings plus their intuition. But not their intuition at the beginning, their intuition at the end after they did the ratings.

    7. DKDaniel Kahneman24:18

       That is, you rate those six traits, and then close your eyes and just have a, have an intuition. How good do you think the soldier is going to be? When the data came back, it turned out that that intuition at the end was the best single predictor. It was just as good as the average of the six traits, and it added information. So-

    8. AGAdam Grant24:51

       Wow

    9. DKDaniel Kahneman24:51

       ... and, you know, I was surprised. You know, I just d- was doing that as a favor to them, letting them have intuitions. But the discovery was very clear, and we ended up with a system in which the average of the six traits and the final intuition had equal weight.

    10. AGAdam Grant25:10

        It, it sounds like what you recommend then concretely is for a manager to make a list of the skills and values that they're trying to select on, to, to do ratings that are anchored on those dimensions. So, you know, I might judge somebody's coding skills if they're a programmer or their ability to sell if they're a salesperson, and then I might also be interested in whether they, you know, they're aligned on our organizational values. And then once I've done that, I wanna form an overall impression of the candidate because I may have picked up on other pieces of information that didn't fit the model that I had.

    11. DKDaniel Kahneman25:43

        I think that's about right.

13. 25:45 – 26:59

    Why managers love intuition: it’s easy, fast, and feels certain

    1. AGAdam Grant25:45

       It, it's such a powerful step that I think should bring the best of both worlds from algorithms and human judgment. There's something that's a little puzzling to me about it, though, which is why are managers and people in general so enamored with intuition?

    2. DKDaniel Kahneman26:00

       I think it's because people don't have an alternative. It's because when they try to reason their way to a conclusion, they end up confusing themselves. And so the intuition wins by default. It makes you feel good, it's easy to do, and it's something that you can do quickly. Uh, whereas careful thinking in a, in a situation of judgment where there is no clearly good answer, careful thinking is painful, it's difficult, and it leaves you in a state of indecision or in a state of even if one option is better than the other, you know that the difference is not something you can be sure of. Whereas when you go the intuitive route, you'll end up with over, you know, with overconfidence certainty and feeling good about yourself. So it's an easy choice, I think.

14. 26:59 – 29:20

    What Kahneman rethought after Thinking, Fast and Slow: individual differences

    1. AGAdam Grant26:59

       You, you wrote about this topic at length in what some have called your magnum opus, Thinking Fast and Slow. I'm wondering what you've rethought since you published that book.

    2. DKDaniel Kahneman27:11

       Well, um, um, you know, there were, there were things I published in that book that were wrong. I mean, you know, literature I quoted that didn't hold up. Now, the, the interesting thing about that is that I haven't changed my mind about much of anything, but that is because changing your mind is really quite difficult. That is, uh, Dan Gilbert has a beautiful word. He called that unbelieving, and unbelieving things is very difficult. So I, I find it extremely hard to unbelieve, uh, aspects or, or parts of Thinking Fast and Slow, even though I know that my grounds for believing them are now much weaker than they were. But the more significant thing that I have begun to rethink is that Thinking Fast and Slow, like most of the study of judgment and decision-making, is completely oblivious to indiv- to individual differences. And all my career, I, I made fun of anybody who was studying individual differences. I say, "I'm interested in main effects. I'm interested in characterizing the human mind." But it turns out that when you go into detail, people, the, those studies that you have, uh, it's not that everybody's behaving like the average of the study. That's simply false. There are different subgroups who are doing different things, and, uh, and life turns out to be much more complicated than if you were just trying to explain the average. So the necessity for studying individual differences is, I think, the most important thing that I have rethought. I, you know, it doesn't have many implications for me because it's too late for me to study individual differences, and I wouldn't like doing it anyway. It's not my style. But, but I think there is much more room for it than I thought when I was writing Thinking Fast and Slow.

15. 29:20 – 35:54

    Choosing problems, the “gold” heuristic, collaboration lessons, and Nobel timing

    1. AGAdam Grant29:20

       Another thing I wanted to ask you about is the choices you make about what problems and projects to work on.

    2. DKDaniel Kahneman29:27

       I'm not a good example for, for anybody. I've really never had a plan. I more or less followed my nose, and I did many thing that I shouldn't have done. Uh, I wasted a lot of time on, on projects, uh, on that I, I shouldn't have carried out. But, you know, I've been lucky.

    3. AGAdam Grant29:54

       Well, I think that's, that's an [laughs] probably an encouraging message for a lot of us.

    4. DKDaniel Kahneman29:57

       That is, and the idea is, is this an area where there is gold, and I'm going to look for it. I mean, that's, that's an idea. And formulating a new question, that's an idea in my book.

    5. AGAdam Grant30:12

       I'm going to use that. This is an area where I think there might be gold, and I wanna look for it. Such a nice reframe. So Danny, you mentioned your, your new book Noise. One of my favorite ideas when I read Noise was the idea of the inner crowd, and I wondered if you could explain that.

    6. DKDaniel Kahneman30:31

       There've been two lines of research by Bull and Paschler and by Hertwig on asking people the same question on two occasions or in two different frames of mind. And it turns out that when you ask the same question, like, uh, an estimate of, you know, the number of airports, um, when you ask people the same question twice separated by some time, then they tend to give you different answers, and the average of the answers is more accurate than each of them separately. It also is the case that the first answer is more valid than the second, and it's also the case that the longer you wait, the better the average is, the more information there is in the second judgment that you make. You know, what it indicates is clearly that what we come up with when we ask ourselves a question is we're sampling from our mind. We're not extracting the answer from our mind. We're sampling an answer from our mind, and there are many different ways that that sample could come out. And sampling twice, uh, especially if you make them independent, sampling twice is going to be better than sampling once.

    7. AGAdam Grant31:54

       This is, this is one of the most practical [laughs] sort of unexpected decision-making and judgment, uh, perspectives that, that I've come across in the last few years in, in part because it says I don't always need a second opinion if I can get better at forming my own second opinions.

    8. DKDaniel Kahneman32:11

       Uh, you know, as... I think as we say in that chapter, uh, sleep over it is really very much the same thing. That is, sleep over it. Just wait, and tomorrow you might think differently. So the advice is out there. Reinforcing it may be useful.

    9. AGAdam Grant32:31

       Your, your collaboration with Amos Tversky is, is obviously legendary. There's a whole Michael Lewis book about it. Is there a, a lesson that you took away from that collaboration that's informed either how you choose your collaborators now or how you work with the, the people on your teams?

    10. DKDaniel Kahneman32:47

        I think that one really important thing in, uh, is, is to be genuinely interested in what your collaborator is, is saying. And, uh, you know, I'm quite competitive. Amos was quite competitive. We were not competitive when we worked together. The joy of, of, of collaboration for me always was that, that that almost... That was more with Amos than with almost anyone else, that I would say something and he would understand it better than I had, and that's the greatest joy, uh, of collaboration. But in my other collaborations, taking pleasure in the ideas of your collaborator seemed to be [laughs] very useful, and I've been lucky that way.

    11. AGAdam Grant33:38

        On that note, al- almost anyone who's ever won a Nobel Prize has complained that it, it hurt their career, uh, and I've wondered what the experience has been like for you.

    12. DKDaniel Kahneman33:49

        Oh, I mean, it hurts people's career if they're young. You know, I, I, uh, got mine when I was 68, and for me it was a net plus.

    13. AGAdam Grant33:58

        Why does it get people in trouble if they get it earlier?

    14. DKDaniel Kahneman34:01

        Oh. In a... You know, there are a variety of ways that this can happen. In the first place, it's very distracting. I mean, people start taking you, uh, more seriously than they did and hanging on your every word, and a lot of nonsense like that. And if, if you begin to take yourself too seriously, that's not good. If you take time away from your work to, to do what you're invited to do when you get a Nobel, which is a lot of talking and a lot of, of talking on things that you don't know much about, that's a loss. And then if it makes you self-conscious that everything that you have to do has to be important, that's a loss. So there are many different ways, I think, in which getting a Nobel early is a bad idea, uh, I mean, is, is not the best.

    15. AGAdam Grant34:57

        Got it.

    16. DKDaniel Kahneman34:58

        I was at a, at a good age to get it because I had some years left in my career, and it made many things much easier having a Nobel, and, uh, it made the, the end of my career more productive, I think, and, and, and happier than it would've been otherwise. [upbeat music]

    17. AGAdam Grant35:27

        Taken for Granted is part of the TED Audio Collective. The show is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and is produced by TED with Transmitter Media. Our team includes Colin Helms, Greta Cohn, Dan O'Donnell, Constanza Gallardo, Joanne Deluna, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quint, Nanvin Chang, and Anna Phelan. This episode was produced by Dan O'Donnell. [upbeat music]

Episode duration: 36:01