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From the Ted Talk by Taken for Granted: Daniel Kahneman Doesn't Trust Your Intuition


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Hey, wloikfre, it's Adam Grant, season four is right around the corner, but today I wanted to share a special conversation in our Taken for Granted series. I'm talking to dienal kmehanan. 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. Oh, my God, no. The behavioral economist. I'm not any kind of economist. 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, cnoimg out later this spring with Cass Sunstein and Olivier Sebti from. This is taken for granted by podcast with the TED Audio Collective, I'm an otinaznrgioaal psychologist, my job is to think again about how we work, lead and live. This conversation with Danny challenged one of my core beliefs about intuition. It also gave me a new way of thinking about which ideas are wroth pursuing. Since Danny is an expert on decision making, I tguohht I'd satrt by asking about what we're seeking in so many of our decisions. You've spent a lot of your career stuinydg happiness and rteeald tcoips. And really, for the first time in my career, I started to wonder why are we so obsessed with happiness as phcsgiosoylts? You know, I'm all for people leading ealnbjoye, satisfying lives. But if I had to chosoe, I would much rather have people focus on character and, you know, trying to build their grensetoiy, their integrity, their commitment to justice, their humility. And I wonder if you could talk to me a little bit about whether you think we've lost our way a bit and character has been too little in focus or too far in the background or whether you think happiness deserves the anettotin it's gotten? Well, I think my focus would be neither happiness nor character. It would be misery. And I think that there is a task for society to reduce misery, not to increase happiness. And when you think of reducing misery, you would be led into very different policy directions. You would be led into mental health iseuss. You would be led into a lot of other problems. So reducing misery would be my focus. Character and happiness or misery are not substitutes. The idea which has been accepted both in the UK and in many other places, other than quite a few other countries by now, is that the objective of sceitoy? The objective of policy should be iinascnreg human welfare or human well-being in a in a general way. I think that's a better objective for policy than increasing the quality of the population's chtacaerr. I think it's a better objective. I think it's it's a more achievable obvjeicte, except I would not focus on the positive and I would fcous on the negative. And I would say it is the rsoplseinbtiiy of society to try to reduce misery. And let's focus on that. We speak of length and not the shortness and we speak of happiness, the domesniin is labeeld by its positive poll. And that's very unfortunate because actually increasing hnasippes and reducing misery are very different things. I arege. And it's interesting to hear you say that reducing misery is more important than promoting happiness. In some ways, that feels like a critique of the positive psychology movement. It is. And tell me a little bit more about why. Well, I think the positive psychology movement has in some ways a delpey 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 I'm not innovating here. But I think that fuonsicg on changing circumstances and dealing directly with misery is more important and is a whroty objective for society than maknig people feel better about their situation. Yeah, I mean, I think it certainly trcaks with how I think about, in general, bad being sgenrotr than good and the alleviation of mseriy contributing more to the quality of people's lveis than, you know, some degree of etvleanig 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. Well. Actually, we once did a sduty in which we we were measuring how people figure, how much of the day are people in different states pioisvte or negative? And it turns out that people are in a positive state on average, 80 percent of the time, more than 80 percent of the time. That is on average, people are on the positive side of zero. Now, look at, say, the 10 percent of the time that people spend suffering. Overall, most of the suffering is concentrated in about 10 to 15 pernect of the population. So it actually is not the same people that you would make less miserable or happier. Those are different populations. And the question is, where do you direct the the whgiet of policy and what you pay more attention to? Very interesting. I like it, so you're basically saying, look, if we have scarce resources, whether those are financial or time or eenrgy, we want to concentrate on the group of people who are suffering as oposepd to those who might be languishing. You know, it seems to me that to some extent we have been trapped by words. I mean, it's the word happiness which seems to stnad for the whole dimension. And and and I think this is ladeing to some policies, actually, this failing to lead to policies that would that would really be directed at increasing human well-being by decreasing misery. Yeah, I think so, too. And it's something I've thought about a lot at work. Given given the hat I wear most often is organisational psychologist, I feel like the osiosesbn with employee engagement has really missed the mark. I don't go to work hoping that I'm going to be engaged toady. I hope that I'm going to have motivation and meaning and that I'm going to have a sense of well-being. And I wonder if if one of the effects that the pandemic has had on a lot of people and a lot of leaders in workplaces is to get them to recognize, you know, what we need to care about people's well-being in their lives, not just their engagement at work. Well. I thought that, you know, I'm not an expert. This is your field, not mine. But I thought that engagement has is close to feeling good at work. I mean, we whether it's the responsibility of weplkcaors to deal with people's well-being in general, I agree that it's they're responsible for dealing with people's well-being at work. And that doesn't seem to me to be very different from trying to make people enaeggd and happy with what they are doing. So I'm a bit curious to hear more about the dichotomy of the dintistocin that you're drawing between engagement and will be my interpretation of engagement, whether it's fairly close to wellbeing at work. Yeah, I think I think in large part it depends on which ccnlaoipuizeoattn and measure of engagement we're talking about. But one of the one of the more isneetntirg patterns in the literature that that's gotten me thinking quite a bit is that it's possible to be an engaged woahiolkrc. 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 gultiy when you're not working and you feel kind of obsessed with the with the problem that you're trying to solve? And I think that one version of engagement is probably htlheeiar than the other. And I associate wleielnbg much more with, you know, with being an itslalinrnciy motivated workaholic than with a compulsive workaholic, even though both are highly engaged. I agree. You know, I worked for a while with Gallup. I was cnelsuotd with Gallup many years ago. And their cncpoet of emnenggeat, I think, was a positive concept. One of the criteria that I remember for ppeole being happy at work is having a freind at work. So clearly, at least, their concept of engagement, which is the one the only one that they know much about, is by and large a positive concept. And certainly the word we don't want people to be compulsive, although. Although I don't know how to desbrcie myself, for example, when when I work hard or when I used to work very hard, was I doing so cmoevsllupiy, was doing so out of intrinsic miotvatoin? I think both I was intrinsically motivated and I was compulsive about. So I'm not sure of the distinction that you're drawing between being compulsive and being intrinsically motivated. Well, I like to call it a look at ambivalence there, because I think it speaks to the point that you raised earlier, which is that, you know, positive emtioons and negative emotions can coexist. You can work because you're passionate about it and because you feel bad if you're not doing it. That's right. I want to ask you about the joy of being wrong. The pclae 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? Hesitating because I can't it's not that I didn't make any mseatkis, 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 earlier, you know, as a student and so I don't have much to report that I have an interest as a researcher, I found my mistakes very iursnvtcite. And and there were sort of positive experiences. By and large. It's such an odd thing to hear you say, because most of us, most of us experience pain, not pleasure. When, 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? Well, you know, those are soanuiitts in which you are surprised. I really enjoyed changing my mind because I enjoy being surprised and I enjoy being surprised because I feel I'm learning something so that it's been that way. I've been lkucy, I think, because I think you're right, that this is not universal, the positive emotion to correct and mistakes. But it's just a matter of luck. I mean, I'm not, you know, not claiming high moral grnuod here. It's it's fascinating to watch, though, because I've seen your eyes lghit up and, you know, it's it's it's palpable when you when you docesivr that you were wrong about a hypothesis or a prediction, you look like you are experiencing joy. And I've started to think a lot about what prvetens people from getting to that place. And I think a lot of it is for so many people, they get trapped in either a preacher or a prosecutor mindset of saying, you know, I I know my beielfs are correct or I know other people are wrong. And at some piont their ideas become part of their iiettndy. And I know even scientists struggle with this. Right. I think at least when I was trained as a social snisitect, I was taught to be passionately dispassionate. But I know a lot of scientists who struggle with dncmehteat, and you don't seem to. So how do you keep your ideas from, I gesus, becoming part of your identity? Well, I think that. I mean, this is going to sound awful. I have never thought that ideas are rare. And, you know, if that idea isn't any good, then there is another that's going to be better. And I think that is probably generally true, but not generally acknowledged. So that for people to give up on an idea may in many cases lead to a sort of panic. If I don't have that idea, then what do I have? Who am I if I don't have that idea? So being less itedifneid with your ideas is also associated, I think, with having many of them just discovering that most of them are no good and trying to to do the best you can with a few that are good. So it's seeing ideas as abundant rather than scarce. That's what makes it easier to stay detached. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I used to tell my students ideas are a dime a dozen. I mean, don't overinvest in your old ideas. And so I used to encourage my students to give up. At a certain point, I suddenly never wanted to read a dissertation by a seudntt with a captehr that would explain why the experiment failed. So that was the kind of advice that I would give them. Think of another idea. Do you ever wrory about getting too dtcehead? I think, for example, about messenger RNA technology, which was seen as, I think a joke for a long time, and if not for the courage and tenacity of a small group of scientists who persisted with it anyway, we might not have a covert vaccine right now. Oh. I think well, in the first place, science, like many other social systems, doesn't thrvie on everybody being the same. So you may have some advice that is good for some people. And it's clear that some people who are irrationally persistent achieved great sscuscees. And indeed, if you look back at the great successes, you will generally find that there is some irrational psersctinee 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 persistence are good things to have. So the expected value of it might be negative, although when you look back every big success you can trace to some irrationality. Well, that goes beautifully to one of my favorite ideas of yours, that we look at suuseccfsl people and we learn from their habits, not realizing that we haven't compared them with people who failed, who had many of the same habits. And I wanted to, I guess, ask you a broader question, which is having put these kinds of decision hisrcetuis and cognitive biases on the map. Which one do you fall vtciim to the most? Is that confirmation bias? It sounds like maybe not. I just wondered which of which of the biases that you've documented is your greatest doemn. All of them, really. All of them, except, as you said, confirmation bias. By the way, people are close to me find this iitnrartig. That is that whenever they have a problem with someone, I automatically take the other side and try to explain that someone might be right after all. So I have that contrarian aspect to what I am. This reminds me a little bit of a possibly apocryphal sotry that 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 jailsunort who asked you how you made tuogh decisions and you said you flip a coin. Is this true? No. OK, good. Absolutely. I'm really I've never flipped a coin to make a decision in my life. The version of the story I heard was that you would flip the coin to oevbsre your own emotional reaction and figure out what your biases were. I might have said that this is one of the benefits of flipping a coin, but I personally have never used that. But it's true that. fiplnpig a coin would be a way of discovering how you feel if you didn't know eelrair that I still believe, I feel very relieved to know that because I was worried about you, given all you know about decision making, making important life cehicos with a coin toss. Welcome back to Taking for Granted and my conversation with Danny Kahneman. He was just setting the record strhiagt that as an eminent scholar of decision making, he does not make decisions based on a coin toss. So how does he make decisions? Well, when I look back at my life, it's been a series of things that, you know, ultimately I made decisions, made life choices clearly, but I did not eeirpnxece them. As decisions, I have very little to say, describing myself about making decisions, in part because I have really strong intuitions and I floolw them usually. So the dioecsin doesn't feel hard if if you know what you are going to do and if you know yourself and you're going to do it anyway, it doesn't feel very hard. I have to say, Danny, I'm a little seokhcd to hear you say that you follow your intuition because you have sepnt most of your ceearr highlighting all the fallacies that come into play when we rely on our intuition. Well, you really have to distinguish the judgment from decision making. And most of the iiottnunis that we've studied were ficlealas of judgment rather than decision making. And second, my attitude to intuition is not that I've spent my life, you know, saying that it's not good enough in the book that we're right and just finished wtrniig. Our advice is not to do without iotnuiitn. It is to delay it. That is, it is not to decide prematurely. And not to have intuitions very early, if you can daley your intuitions, I think they're are your best guide probably about what you should be doing. OK, so two questions there. One is how the other is why, well, you delay your intuitions, you know. No, I'm tnkilag about formal decisions, dsoniecis that might be taken within an organization or a decision that an interviewer might take in diecnidg whether or not to hire a candidate. And he had the advice of delaying intuition is simply because when you have foremd an intuition, you are no longer taking in information. You are just rationalizing your own decision or you're confirming your own decision. And there is a lot of research itcianding 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. 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. That is that what you're after? Yes, because I don't think you can make decisions without there being endorsed by your intuitions. You have to feel conviction. You have to feel that there is some good rosaen to be doing what you are doing, so ulaettilmy intuition must be involved. But if it's involved, if if you jump to cuscinnloos too early or jump to decisions too erlay, then you are going to make avoidable mistakes. Well, this is an interesting tsiwt on, I guess, how I've thought about intuition, especially in a hiring coetxnt, but I think it applies to a lot of places. My advice for a long time has been, don't turst your intuition, test your intuition, because I think about intuition is a subconscious pattern recognition. And I want to make those pretants conscious so I can figure out whether whatever relationship I have detected in the past is relevant to the present. And it seems like that's what what you've aergud 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 fdebcaek on your judgment. I think the tnesion 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, OK, let's make your intuition explicit instead of implicit early on so that then you can rigorously clhelgane it and figure out if it's valid in this situation. I've been deeply influenced by something that I did very early in my career. When I was 22 years old, I set up an interviewing system for the iralesi army. It was to determine suitability for combat units. And the interview system that I designed broke up the problem so that you had fexid rates that you were interviewing about, you're asking factual questions about each trade at the time and you were scoring each trade once you had completed the questions about that trade 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 cdateiands on specific traits like work ethic, analytical ability or integrity. But interviewers did not take it well. They really htaed the system. When I introduced it and they they told me I mean, I vividly remember one of them saying, you're turning us into robots. Danny decided to test which approach worked best. Was that their intuition or their ratings from the data? The awsner was both their ratings plus their intuition, but not their intuition at the beginning, their intuition at the end, after they did the ratings, that is, you read those six straight and then close your eyes and just have an intuition how good 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 or the sixth straight, and it adedd information. So, wow. You know, I was surprised, you know, I just was doing that as a favor to them, letting them have intuitions. But the discovery was very clear. And we ended up with a system in which the average of the six traits and the final intuition had equal weight. It sdonus like what you remmcneod then concretely is for a maagenr to make a list of the slilks and values that they're trying to select on to to do ratings that are anchored on those dsnmnoiies. So, you know, I might judge somebody who's coding skills if they're a pmrgmoarer 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 want to form an overall impression of the candidate, because I may have pkiecd up on other pieces of information that didn't fit the model that I had. I think that's about right. It's such a pueofrwl 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 gneaerl so enamored with intuition? I think it's because people don't have an alternative. It's because when they try to reason their way to a conclusion. They end up cunnsifog themselves. And so the intuition wins by default, it makes you feel good. It's easy to do and it's something that you can do quickly, whereas careful thinking in a in a siitatoun of judgment where there is no clearly good answer, careful tiinnhkg is painful, it's dfiiuflct, and it leaves you in a state of indecision or in a sttae or even if one oopitn is better than the other. You know that the difference is not something you can be sure of, whereas when you go to the ituvtiine route , you'll end up with all, you know, with overconfident certainty and feienlg good about yourself. So it's an easy choice. I think you you wrote about this topic at length and what some have called your magnum opus , thinking fast and slow. I'm wondering what you've rethought since you published that book. Well, um. You know, there were there were things I pilhsubed in that book that were wrong. I mean, you know, liuaterrte I quoted that didn't hold up. Now, the interesting thing about that is that I haven't changed my mind about much of anything. But that is because changing your mind is really quite difficult. That is Dan Gilbert has a beautiful word equal that unbelieving and unbelieving things are very difficult. So I find it extremely hard to unbelieve aspects of Pozza 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 the individual differences. And all my career I I made fun of anybody 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, those studies that you have, it's not that everybody is behaving like the average of the study. That's simply false. There are different sbrpougus were doing different things. And 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 drcfeinfees is, I think the most important thing that I have rethought and, you know, doesn't have any imoniipctlas for me because it's too late for me to study idadinuvil differences. And I wouldn't like doing it anyway. It's not my slyte. But I think there is much more room for it than I thought when I was writing, thinking fast and slow. Another thing I wanted to ask you about is the choices you make about what prmeobls and projects to work on. I'm not a good example for anybody. I really never had a plan. A more or less followed my nose and I did many things that I shouldn't have done. I wasted a lot of time on projects that I shouldn't have crreiad out, but. No, I've been lucky. Well, I think that that's probably an encouraging message for a lot of us, that 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 qsuiteon to an idea in my book, I'm going to use that this is an area where I think there might be gold and I want to look for it. Such a nice reframe. So, dnnay, you mentioned in your new book, Noize, one of my favorite ideas when I read Noise was the idea of the inner crowd. And I wondered if you could explain that there have been two lines of rearsceh by Bulan Besner and by her Twigg. And asking people the same question. On two occasions or in two different friends of mine, and it turns out that when you ask the same question like an estimate of the number of airports, when you ask people the same question twice separated by some time, then they tend to give you a different answers. And the average of the answers is more accurate than each of them separately. Also, in the case that the first answer is more valid than the second, and it's also the case, the longer you wait, the better the average is, the more information there is in the second jgmenudt that you make. You know, what it indicates is clearly that what we come up with when we ask ourselves a question is we are sampling from our mind. We are not extracting the answers from our mind. We are sampling an answer from our mind. And there are many different ways that that sample could come out. And sampling twice, especially if you will make them ineenpdednt sampling twice is going to be better than sampling once. This is this is one of the most practical, uceexetpnd decision making and judgment perpcvseties that I've come across in the last few years, in part because it says, I don't always need a second opinion if I can get better at forming my own second opinions. Oh, you know, I think as we say in that chapter sleepover, it is really very much the same thing that is sleepover. And just wait. And tomorrow you might think differently. So the avicde is out there reinforcing it, maybe useful. Your collaboration with Amos Tversky is obviously legendary, there's a whole Michael Lewis book about it. Is there a lesson that you took away from that collaboration that's informed either how you choose your collaborators now or how you work with the people on your team? I think that one really important thing in is. It's to be genuinely ietesnterd in what your collaborator is say, and, you know, I am quite cpvmeititoe. I'm also quite competitive. We were not competitive when we worked together. The joy of love, of collaboration for me always was that. But that almost that was more with them than with almost anyone else. I would say something and he would understand it better than I had. And that's the greatest joy of collaboration. But in my other collaborations, taking pleasure in the iades of your colobrtlaaor seemed to be very useful, and I've been lucky that way. On that note, almost anyone who's ever won a Nobel Prize has complained that it hurt their career. And I've wondered what the experience has been like for you or I mean, it hurts people's career if they're young. You know, I got mine when I was 68, and for me it was a net loss. Why does it get people in trouble if they get it earlier? Oh, you know, there are a variety of ways that this can happen in the first place. It's very destructive. I mean, people start taking you more seriously than they did and hanging on your every word and a lot of nosennse like this. 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 are invited to do when you get a Nobel, which is a lot of talking and a lot of talking and think 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 is not the best gift. I was at a good age to get it because I had some yeras left in my career and it made many things much easier having a nbeol and it made the end of my career more productive, I think, and and happier than it would have been otherwise. Taken for gerntad as part of the TED aduio ccvoetlile, the show is hosted by Adam garnt and it's produced by TED with trmtistenad Media. Our team includes Colin Helmes, Credit, Dan O'Donnell, catnsonza Gelada, Joanne DeLuna, Grace rsbetueinn, Michelle qniut and Ben Chang and Anna Feeling. This episode was produced by Dan O'Donnell.

Open Cloze


Hey, ________, it's Adam Grant, season four is right around the corner, but today I wanted to share a special conversation in our Taken for Granted series. I'm talking to ______ ________. 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. Oh, my God, no. The behavioral economist. I'm not any kind of economist. 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, ______ out later this spring with Cass Sunstein and Olivier Sebti from. This is taken for granted by podcast with the TED Audio Collective, I'm an ______________ psychologist, my job is to think again about how we work, lead and live. This conversation with Danny challenged one of my core beliefs about intuition. It also gave me a new way of thinking about which ideas are _____ pursuing. Since Danny is an expert on decision making, I _______ I'd _____ by asking about what we're seeking in so many of our decisions. You've spent a lot of your career ________ happiness and _______ ______. And really, for the first time in my career, I started to wonder why are we so obsessed with happiness as _____________? You know, I'm all for people leading _________, satisfying lives. But if I had to ______, I would much rather have people focus on character and, you know, trying to build their __________, their integrity, their commitment to justice, their humility. And I wonder if you could talk to me a little bit about whether you think we've lost our way a bit and character has been too little in focus or too far in the background or whether you think happiness deserves the _________ it's gotten? Well, I think my focus would be neither happiness nor character. It would be misery. And I think that there is a task for society to reduce misery, not to increase happiness. And when you think of reducing misery, you would be led into very different policy directions. You would be led into mental health ______. You would be led into a lot of other problems. So reducing misery would be my focus. Character and happiness or misery are not substitutes. The idea which has been accepted both in the UK and in many other places, other than quite a few other countries by now, is that the objective of _______? The objective of policy should be __________ human welfare or human well-being in a in a general way. I think that's a better objective for policy than increasing the quality of the population's _________. I think it's a better objective. I think it's it's a more achievable _________, except I would not focus on the positive and I would _____ on the negative. And I would say it is the ______________ of society to try to reduce misery. And let's focus on that. We speak of length and not the shortness and we speak of happiness, the _________ is _______ by its positive poll. And that's very unfortunate because actually increasing _________ and reducing misery are very different things. I _____. And it's interesting to hear you say that reducing misery is more important than promoting happiness. In some ways, that feels like a critique of the positive psychology movement. It is. And tell me a little bit more about why. Well, I think the positive psychology movement has in some ways a ______ 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 I'm not innovating here. But I think that ________ on changing circumstances and dealing directly with misery is more important and is a ______ objective for society than ______ people feel better about their situation. Yeah, I mean, I think it certainly ______ with how I think about, in general, bad being ________ than good and the alleviation of ______ contributing more to the quality of people's _____ than, you know, some degree of _________ 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. Well. Actually, we once did a _____ in which we we were measuring how people figure, how much of the day are people in different states ________ or negative? And it turns out that people are in a positive state on average, 80 percent of the time, more than 80 percent of the time. That is on average, people are on the positive side of zero. Now, look at, say, the 10 percent of the time that people spend suffering. Overall, most of the suffering is concentrated in about 10 to 15 _______ of the population. So it actually is not the same people that you would make less miserable or happier. Those are different populations. And the question is, where do you direct the the ______ of policy and what you pay more attention to? Very interesting. I like it, so you're basically saying, look, if we have scarce resources, whether those are financial or time or ______, we want to concentrate on the group of people who are suffering as _______ to those who might be languishing. You know, it seems to me that to some extent we have been trapped by words. I mean, it's the word happiness which seems to _____ for the whole dimension. And and and I think this is _______ to some policies, actually, this failing to lead to policies that would that would really be directed at increasing human well-being by decreasing misery. Yeah, I think so, too. And it's something I've thought about a lot at work. Given given the hat I wear most often is organisational psychologist, I feel like the _________ with employee engagement has really missed the mark. I don't go to work hoping that I'm going to be engaged _____. I hope that I'm going to have motivation and meaning and that I'm going to have a sense of well-being. And I wonder if if one of the effects that the pandemic has had on a lot of people and a lot of leaders in workplaces is to get them to recognize, you know, what we need to care about people's well-being in their lives, not just their engagement at work. Well. I thought that, you know, I'm not an expert. This is your field, not mine. But I thought that engagement has is close to feeling good at work. I mean, we whether it's the responsibility of __________ to deal with people's well-being in general, I agree that it's they're responsible for dealing with people's well-being at work. And that doesn't seem to me to be very different from trying to make people _______ and happy with what they are doing. So I'm a bit curious to hear more about the dichotomy of the ___________ that you're drawing between engagement and will be my interpretation of engagement, whether it's fairly close to wellbeing at work. Yeah, I think I think in large part it depends on which _________________ and measure of engagement we're talking about. But one of the one of the more ___________ patterns in the literature that that's gotten me thinking quite a bit is that it's possible to be an engaged __________. 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 ______ when you're not working and you feel kind of obsessed with the with the problem that you're trying to solve? And I think that one version of engagement is probably _________ than the other. And I associate _________ much more with, you know, with being an _____________ motivated workaholic than with a compulsive workaholic, even though both are highly engaged. I agree. You know, I worked for a while with Gallup. I was _________ with Gallup many years ago. And their _______ of __________, I think, was a positive concept. One of the criteria that I remember for ______ being happy at work is having a ______ at work. So clearly, at least, their concept of engagement, which is the one the only one that they know much about, is by and large a positive concept. And certainly the word we don't want people to be compulsive, although. Although I don't know how to ________ myself, for example, when when I work hard or when I used to work very hard, was I doing so ____________, was doing so out of intrinsic __________? I think both I was intrinsically motivated and I was compulsive about. So I'm not sure of the distinction that you're drawing between being compulsive and being intrinsically motivated. Well, I like to call it a look at ambivalence there, because I think it speaks to the point that you raised earlier, which is that, you know, positive ________ and negative emotions can coexist. You can work because you're passionate about it and because you feel bad if you're not doing it. That's right. I want to ask you about the joy of being wrong. The _____ 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? Hesitating because I can't it's not that I didn't make any ________, 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 earlier, you know, as a student and so I don't have much to report that I have an interest as a researcher, I found my mistakes very ___________. And and there were sort of positive experiences. By and large. It's such an odd thing to hear you say, because most of us, most of us experience pain, not pleasure. When, 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? Well, you know, those are __________ in which you are surprised. I really enjoyed changing my mind because I enjoy being surprised and I enjoy being surprised because I feel I'm learning something so that it's been that way. I've been _____, I think, because I think you're right, that this is not universal, the positive emotion to correct and mistakes. But it's just a matter of luck. I mean, I'm not, you know, not claiming high moral ______ here. It's it's fascinating to watch, though, because I've seen your eyes _____ up and, you know, it's it's it's palpable when you when you ________ that you were wrong about a hypothesis or a prediction, you look like you are experiencing joy. And I've started to think a lot about what ________ people from getting to that place. And I think a lot of it is for so many people, they get trapped in either a preacher or a prosecutor mindset of saying, you know, I I know my _______ are correct or I know other people are wrong. And at some _____ their ideas become part of their ________. And I know even scientists struggle with this. Right. I think at least when I was trained as a social _________, I was taught to be passionately dispassionate. But I know a lot of scientists who struggle with __________, and you don't seem to. So how do you keep your ideas from, I _____, becoming part of your identity? Well, I think that. I mean, this is going to sound awful. I have never thought that ideas are rare. And, you know, if that idea isn't any good, then there is another that's going to be better. And I think that is probably generally true, but not generally acknowledged. So that for people to give up on an idea may in many cases lead to a sort of panic. If I don't have that idea, then what do I have? Who am I if I don't have that idea? So being less __________ with your ideas is also associated, I think, with having many of them just discovering that most of them are no good and trying to to do the best you can with a few that are good. So it's seeing ideas as abundant rather than scarce. That's what makes it easier to stay detached. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I used to tell my students ideas are a dime a dozen. I mean, don't overinvest in your old ideas. And so I used to encourage my students to give up. At a certain point, I suddenly never wanted to read a dissertation by a _______ with a _______ that would explain why the experiment failed. So that was the kind of advice that I would give them. Think of another idea. Do you ever _____ about getting too ________? I think, for example, about messenger RNA technology, which was seen as, I think a joke for a long time, and if not for the courage and tenacity of a small group of scientists who persisted with it anyway, we might not have a covert vaccine right now. Oh. I think well, in the first place, science, like many other social systems, doesn't ______ on everybody being the same. So you may have some advice that is good for some people. And it's clear that some people who are irrationally persistent achieved great _________. And indeed, if you look back at the great successes, you will generally find that there is some irrational ___________ 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 persistence are good things to have. So the expected value of it might be negative, although when you look back every big success you can trace to some irrationality. Well, that goes beautifully to one of my favorite ideas of yours, that we look at __________ people and we learn from their habits, not realizing that we haven't compared them with people who failed, who had many of the same habits. And I wanted to, I guess, ask you a broader question, which is having put these kinds of decision __________ and cognitive biases on the map. Which one do you fall ______ to the most? Is that confirmation bias? It sounds like maybe not. I just wondered which of which of the biases that you've documented is your greatest _____. All of them, really. All of them, except, as you said, confirmation bias. By the way, people are close to me find this __________. That is that whenever they have a problem with someone, I automatically take the other side and try to explain that someone might be right after all. So I have that contrarian aspect to what I am. This reminds me a little bit of a possibly apocryphal _____ that 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 __________ who asked you how you made _____ decisions and you said you flip a coin. Is this true? No. OK, good. Absolutely. I'm really I've never flipped a coin to make a decision in my life. The version of the story I heard was that you would flip the coin to _______ your own emotional reaction and figure out what your biases were. I might have said that this is one of the benefits of flipping a coin, but I personally have never used that. But it's true that. ________ a coin would be a way of discovering how you feel if you didn't know _______ that I still believe, I feel very relieved to know that because I was worried about you, given all you know about decision making, making important life _______ with a coin toss. Welcome back to Taking for Granted and my conversation with Danny Kahneman. He was just setting the record ________ that as an eminent scholar of decision making, he does not make decisions based on a coin toss. So how does he make decisions? Well, when I look back at my life, it's been a series of things that, you know, ultimately I made decisions, made life choices clearly, but I did not __________ them. As decisions, I have very little to say, describing myself about making decisions, in part because I have really strong intuitions and I ______ them usually. So the ________ doesn't feel hard if if you know what you are going to do and if you know yourself and you're going to do it anyway, it doesn't feel very hard. I have to say, Danny, I'm a little _______ to hear you say that you follow your intuition because you have _____ most of your ______ highlighting all the fallacies that come into play when we rely on our intuition. Well, you really have to distinguish the judgment from decision making. And most of the __________ that we've studied were _________ of judgment rather than decision making. And second, my attitude to intuition is not that I've spent my life, you know, saying that it's not good enough in the book that we're right and just finished _______. Our advice is not to do without _________. It is to delay it. That is, it is not to decide prematurely. And not to have intuitions very early, if you can _____ your intuitions, I think they're are your best guide probably about what you should be doing. OK, so two questions there. One is how the other is why, well, you delay your intuitions, you know. No, I'm _______ about formal decisions, _________ that might be taken within an organization or a decision that an interviewer might take in ________ whether or not to hire a candidate. And he had the advice of delaying intuition is simply because when you have ______ an intuition, you are no longer taking in information. You are just rationalizing your own decision or you're confirming your own decision. And there is a lot of research __________ 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. 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. That is that what you're after? Yes, because I don't think you can make decisions without there being endorsed by your intuitions. You have to feel conviction. You have to feel that there is some good ______ to be doing what you are doing, so __________ intuition must be involved. But if it's involved, if if you jump to ___________ too early or jump to decisions too _____, then you are going to make avoidable mistakes. Well, this is an interesting _____ on, I guess, how I've thought about intuition, especially in a hiring _______, but I think it applies to a lot of places. My advice for a long time has been, don't _____ your intuition, test your intuition, because I think about intuition is a subconscious pattern recognition. And I want to make those ________ conscious so I can figure out whether whatever relationship I have detected in the past is relevant to the present. And it seems like that's what what you've ______ 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 ________ on your judgment. I think the _______ 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, OK, let's make your intuition explicit instead of implicit early on so that then you can rigorously _________ it and figure out if it's valid in this situation. I've been deeply influenced by something that I did very early in my career. When I was 22 years old, I set up an interviewing system for the _______ army. It was to determine suitability for combat units. And the interview system that I designed broke up the problem so that you had _____ rates that you were interviewing about, you're asking factual questions about each trade at the time and you were scoring each trade once you had completed the questions about that trade 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 __________ on specific traits like work ethic, analytical ability or integrity. But interviewers did not take it well. They really _____ the system. When I introduced it and they they told me I mean, I vividly remember one of them saying, you're turning us into robots. Danny decided to test which approach worked best. Was that their intuition or their ratings from the data? The ______ was both their ratings plus their intuition, but not their intuition at the beginning, their intuition at the end, after they did the ratings, that is, you read those six straight and then close your eyes and just have an intuition how good 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 or the sixth straight, and it _____ information. So, wow. You know, I was surprised, you know, I just was doing that as a favor to them, letting them have intuitions. But the discovery was very clear. And we ended up with a system in which the average of the six traits and the final intuition had equal weight. It ______ like what you _________ then concretely is for a _______ to make a list of the ______ and values that they're trying to select on to to do ratings that are anchored on those __________. So, you know, I might judge somebody who's coding skills if they're a __________ 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 want to form an overall impression of the candidate, because I may have ______ up on other pieces of information that didn't fit the model that I had. I think that's about right. It's such a ________ 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 _______ so enamored with intuition? I think it's because people don't have an alternative. It's because when they try to reason their way to a conclusion. They end up _________ themselves. And so the intuition wins by default, it makes you feel good. It's easy to do and it's something that you can do quickly, whereas careful thinking in a in a _________ of judgment where there is no clearly good answer, careful ________ is painful, it's _________, and it leaves you in a state of indecision or in a _____ or even if one ______ is better than the other. You know that the difference is not something you can be sure of, whereas when you go to the _________ route , you'll end up with all, you know, with overconfident certainty and _______ good about yourself. So it's an easy choice. I think you you wrote about this topic at length and what some have called your magnum opus , thinking fast and slow. I'm wondering what you've rethought since you published that book. Well, um. You know, there were there were things I _________ in that book that were wrong. I mean, you know, __________ I quoted that didn't hold up. Now, the interesting thing about that is that I haven't changed my mind about much of anything. But that is because changing your mind is really quite difficult. That is Dan Gilbert has a beautiful word equal that unbelieving and unbelieving things are very difficult. So I find it extremely hard to unbelieve aspects of Pozza 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 the individual differences. And all my career I I made fun of anybody 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, those studies that you have, it's not that everybody is behaving like the average of the study. That's simply false. There are different _________ were doing different things. And 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 ___________ is, I think the most important thing that I have rethought and, you know, doesn't have any ____________ for me because it's too late for me to study __________ differences. And I wouldn't like doing it anyway. It's not my _____. But I think there is much more room for it than I thought when I was writing, thinking fast and slow. Another thing I wanted to ask you about is the choices you make about what ________ and projects to work on. I'm not a good example for anybody. I really never had a plan. A more or less followed my nose and I did many things that I shouldn't have done. I wasted a lot of time on projects that I shouldn't have _______ out, but. No, I've been lucky. Well, I think that that's probably an encouraging message for a lot of us, that 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 ________ to an idea in my book, I'm going to use that this is an area where I think there might be gold and I want to look for it. Such a nice reframe. So, _____, you mentioned in your new book, Noize, one of my favorite ideas when I read Noise was the idea of the inner crowd. And I wondered if you could explain that there have been two lines of ________ by Bulan Besner and by her Twigg. And asking people the same question. On two occasions or in two different friends of mine, and it turns out that when you ask the same question like an estimate of the number of airports, when you ask people the same question twice separated by some time, then they tend to give you a different answers. And the average of the answers is more accurate than each of them separately. Also, in the case that the first answer is more valid than the second, and it's also the case, the longer you wait, the better the average is, the more information there is in the second ________ that you make. You know, what it indicates is clearly that what we come up with when we ask ourselves a question is we are sampling from our mind. We are not extracting the answers from our mind. We are sampling an answer from our mind. And there are many different ways that that sample could come out. And sampling twice, especially if you will make them ___________ sampling twice is going to be better than sampling once. This is this is one of the most practical, __________ decision making and judgment ____________ that I've come across in the last few years, in part because it says, I don't always need a second opinion if I can get better at forming my own second opinions. Oh, you know, I think as we say in that chapter sleepover, it is really very much the same thing that is sleepover. And just wait. And tomorrow you might think differently. So the ______ is out there reinforcing it, maybe useful. Your collaboration with Amos Tversky is obviously legendary, there's a whole Michael Lewis book about it. Is there a lesson that you took away from that collaboration that's informed either how you choose your collaborators now or how you work with the people on your team? I think that one really important thing in is. It's to be genuinely __________ in what your collaborator is say, and, you know, I am quite ___________. I'm also quite competitive. We were not competitive when we worked together. The joy of love, of collaboration for me always was that. But that almost that was more with them than with almost anyone else. I would say something and he would understand it better than I had. And that's the greatest joy of collaboration. But in my other collaborations, taking pleasure in the _____ of your ____________ seemed to be very useful, and I've been lucky that way. On that note, almost anyone who's ever won a Nobel Prize has complained that it hurt their career. And I've wondered what the experience has been like for you or I mean, it hurts people's career if they're young. You know, I got mine when I was 68, and for me it was a net loss. Why does it get people in trouble if they get it earlier? Oh, you know, there are a variety of ways that this can happen in the first place. It's very destructive. I mean, people start taking you more seriously than they did and hanging on your every word and a lot of ________ like this. 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 are invited to do when you get a Nobel, which is a lot of talking and a lot of talking and think 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 is not the best gift. I was at a good age to get it because I had some _____ left in my career and it made many things much easier having a _____ and it made the end of my career more productive, I think, and and happier than it would have been otherwise. Taken for _______ as part of the TED _____ __________, the show is hosted by Adam _____ and it's produced by TED with ___________ Media. Our team includes Colin Helmes, Credit, Dan O'Donnell, _________ Gelada, Joanne DeLuna, Grace __________, Michelle _____ and Ben Chang and Anna Feeling. This episode was produced by Dan O'Donnell.

Solution


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  183. engagement
  184. dimensions

Original Text


Hey, WorkLife, it's Adam Grant, season four 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. Oh, my God, no. The behavioral economist. I'm not any kind of economist. 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 Sebti from. This is taken for granted by 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 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 is 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'm all for people leading enjoyable, satisfying lives. But if I had to choose, I would much rather have people focus on character and, 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 been too little in focus or too far in the background or whether you think happiness deserves the attention it's gotten? Well, I think my focus would be neither happiness nor character. It would be misery. And I think that there is a task for society to reduce misery, not to increase happiness. And when you think of reducing misery, you would be led into very different policy directions. You would be led into mental health issues. You would be led into a lot of other problems. So reducing misery would be my focus. Character and happiness or misery are not substitutes. The idea which has been accepted both in the UK and in many other places, other than quite a few other countries by now, is that the objective of society? The objective of policy should be increasing human welfare or human well-being 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 it's a more achievable objective, except I would not focus on the positive and I would focus on the negative. 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 the shortness and we speak of happiness, the dimension is labeled by its positive poll. And that's very unfortunate because actually increasing happiness and reducing misery are very different things. I agree. And it's interesting to hear you say that reducing misery is more important than promoting happiness. In some ways, that feels like a critique of the positive psychology movement. It is. And tell me a little bit more about why. Well, I think the positive psychology movement has in some 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 I'm not innovating here. But I think that focusing on changing circumstances and dealing directly with misery is more important and is a worthy objective for society than making people feel better about their situation. Yeah, I mean, I think it certainly tracks with how I think about, in general, bad being stronger than good and the alleviation of misery contributing more to the quality of people's lives than, you know, some degree of elevating of of the amount of joy that they feel. But I also wonder at times if this is not a false dichotomy, that if you want to make people happy, it's awfully difficult to do that if you don't pay attention to the misery or suffering that they might experience. Well. Actually, we once did a study in which we we were measuring how people figure, 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 percent of the time, more than 80 percent of the time. That is on average, people are on the positive side of zero. Now, look at, say, the 10 percent of the time that people spend suffering. Overall, most of the suffering is concentrated in about 10 to 15 percent of the population. So it actually is not the same people that you would make less miserable or happier. Those are different populations. And the question is, where do you direct the the weight of policy and what you pay more attention to? Very interesting. I like it, so you're basically saying, look, if we have scarce resources, whether those are financial or time or energy, we want to concentrate on the group of people who are suffering as opposed to those who might be languishing. You know, it seems to me that to some extent we have been trapped by words. I mean, it's the word happiness which seems to stand for the whole dimension. And and and I think this is leading to some policies, actually, this failing to lead to policies that would that would really be directed at increasing human well-being by decreasing misery. Yeah, I think so, too. And it's something I've thought about a lot at work. Given given the hat I wear most often is organisational psychologist, I feel like the obsession with employee engagement has really missed the mark. I don't go to work hoping that I'm going to be engaged today. I hope that I'm going to have motivation and meaning and that I'm going to have a sense of well-being. And I wonder if if one of the effects that the pandemic has had on a lot of people and a lot of leaders in workplaces is to get them to recognize, you know, what we need to care about people's well-being in their lives, not just their engagement at work. Well. I thought that, you know, I'm not an expert. This is your field, not mine. But I thought that engagement has is close to feeling good at work. I mean, we whether it's the responsibility of workplaces to deal with people's well-being in general, I agree that it's they're responsible for dealing with people's well-being at work. And that doesn't seem to me to be very different from trying to make people engaged and happy with what they are doing. So I'm a bit curious to hear more about the dichotomy of the distinction that you're drawing between engagement and will be my interpretation of engagement, whether it's fairly close to wellbeing at work. Yeah, I think I think 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 it's possible to be an engaged workaholic. 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 guilty when you're not working and you feel kind of obsessed with the 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 than with a compulsive workaholic, even though both are highly engaged. I agree. You know, I worked for a while with Gallup. I was consulted with Gallup many years ago. And their concept of engagement, I think, was a positive concept. One of the criteria that I remember for people being happy at work is having a friend at work. So clearly, at least, their concept of engagement, which is the one the only one that they know much about, is by and large a positive concept. And certainly 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 work hard or when I used to work very hard, was I doing so compulsively, was doing so out of intrinsic motivation? I think both I was intrinsically motivated and I was compulsive about. So I'm not sure of the distinction that you're drawing between being compulsive and being intrinsically motivated. Well, I like to call it a look at ambivalence there, because I think it speaks to the point that you raised earlier, 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. That's right. I want to ask you about the joy of being wrong. The place I wanted to begin on this is to ask you, when you were growing up or earlier in your life, how did you handle making mistakes? 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 earlier, you know, as a student and so I don't have much to report that I have an interest as a researcher, I found my mistakes very instructive. And and there were sort of positive experiences. By and large. It's such an odd thing to hear you say, because most of us, most of us experience pain, not pleasure. When, 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? Well, you know, those are situations in which you are surprised. I really enjoyed changing my mind because I enjoy being surprised and I enjoy being surprised because I feel I'm learning something so that 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 correct and mistakes. But it's just a matter of luck. I mean, I'm not, you know, not claiming high moral ground here. It's it's fascinating to watch, though, because I've seen your eyes light up and, you know, it's it's it's palpable when you when you discover that you were wrong about a hypothesis or a prediction, you look like you are experiencing joy. And I've started to think a lot about what prevents people from getting to that place. And I think a lot of it is for so many people, they get trapped in either a preacher or a prosecutor mindset of saying, you know, I I know my beliefs are correct or I know other people are wrong. And at some point their ideas become part of their identity. And I know even scientists struggle with this. Right. I think at least when I was trained as a social scientist, I was taught to be passionately dispassionate. But I know a lot of scientists who struggle with detachment, and you don't seem to. So how do you keep your ideas from, I guess, becoming part of your identity? Well, I think that. I mean, this is going to sound awful. I have never thought that ideas are rare. And, you know, if that idea isn't any good, then there is another that's going to be better. And I think that is probably generally true, but not generally acknowledged. So that for people to give up on an idea may in many cases lead to a sort of panic. If I don't have that idea, then what do I have? Who am I if I don't have that idea? So being less identified with your ideas is also associated, I think, with having many of them just discovering that most of them are no good and trying to to do the best you can with a few that are good. So it's seeing ideas as abundant rather than scarce. That's what makes it easier to stay detached. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I used to tell my students ideas are a dime a dozen. I mean, don't overinvest in your old ideas. And so I used to encourage my students to give up. At a certain point, I suddenly never wanted to read a dissertation by a student with a chapter that would explain why the experiment failed. So that was the kind of advice that I would give them. Think of another idea. Do you ever worry about getting too detached? I think, for example, about messenger RNA technology, which was seen as, I think a joke for a long time, and if not for the courage and tenacity of a small group of scientists who persisted with it anyway, we might not have a covert vaccine right now. Oh. I think well, in the first place, science, like many other social systems, doesn't thrive on everybody being the same. So you may have some advice that is good for some people. And it's clear that some people who are irrationally persistent achieved great successes. And indeed, if you look back at the 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 persistence are good things to have. So the expected value of it might be negative, although when you look back every big success you can trace to some irrationality. Well, that goes beautifully to one of my favorite ideas of yours, that we look at successful people and we learn from their habits, not realizing that we haven't compared them with people who failed, who had many of the same habits. And I wanted to, I guess, ask you a broader question, which is having put these kinds of decision heuristics and cognitive biases on the map. Which one do you fall victim to the most? Is that confirmation bias? It sounds like maybe not. I just wondered which of which of the biases that you've documented is your greatest demon. All of them, really. All of them, except, as you said, confirmation bias. By the way, people are close to me find this irritating. That is that whenever they have a problem with someone, I automatically take the other side and try to explain that someone might be right after all. So I have that contrarian aspect to what I am. This reminds me a little bit of a possibly apocryphal story that 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? No. OK, good. Absolutely. I'm really I've never flipped a coin to make a decision in my life. The version of the story I heard was that you would flip the coin to observe your own emotional reaction and figure out what your biases were. I might have said that this is one of the benefits of flipping a coin, but I personally have never used that. But it's true that. Flipping a coin would be a way of discovering how you feel if you didn't know earlier that I still believe, I feel very relieved to know that because I was worried about you, given all you know about decision making, making important life choices with a coin toss. Welcome back to Taking 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? Well, when I look back at my life, it's been a series of things that, you know, ultimately I made decisions, made life choices clearly, but I did not experience them. As decisions, I have very little to say, describing myself about making decisions, in part because I have really strong intuitions and I follow them usually. So the decision doesn't feel hard if if you know what you are going to do and if you know yourself and you're going to do it anyway, it doesn't feel very hard. I have to say, Danny, I'm a little shocked to hear you say that you follow your intuition because you have spent most of your career highlighting all the fallacies that come into play when we rely on our intuition. Well, you really have to distinguish the judgment from decision making. And most of the intuitions that we've studied were fallacies of judgment rather than decision making. And second, my attitude to intuition is not that I've spent my life, you know, saying that it's not good enough in the book that we're right and 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 are your best guide probably about what you should be doing. OK, so two questions there. One is how the other is why, well, you delay your intuitions, you know. No, 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 he had the advice of delaying intuition is simply because when you have formed an intuition, you are no longer taking in information. You are just rationalizing your own decision or you're confirming your own decision. And there is a lot of research indicating that this is actually what happens in interviews, that 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. 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. That is that what you're after? Yes, because I don't think you can make decisions without there 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 are 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, then you are going to make avoidable mistakes. Well, 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 advice for a long time has been, don't trust your intuition, test your intuition, because I think about intuition is a subconscious pattern recognition. And I want to make those patterns conscious so I can figure out whether whatever relationship I have detected in the past is relevant to the present. And 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 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, OK, let's make your intuition explicit instead of implicit early on so that then you can rigorously challenge it and figure out if it's valid in this situation. I've been deeply influenced by something that I did very early in my career. When I was 22 years old, I set up an interviewing system for the Israeli army. It was to determine suitability for combat units. And the interview system that I designed broke up the problem so that you had fixed rates that you were interviewing about, you're asking factual questions about each trade at the time and you were scoring each trade once you had completed the questions about that trade 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. They really hated the system. When I introduced it and they they told me I mean, I vividly remember one of them saying, you're turning us into robots. Danny decided to test which approach worked best. Was that their intuition or their ratings from the data? The answer was both their ratings plus their intuition, but not their intuition at the beginning, their intuition at the end, after they did the ratings, that is, you read those six straight and then close your eyes and just have an intuition how good 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 or the sixth straight, and it added information. So, wow. You know, I was surprised, you know, I just was doing that as a favor to them, letting them have intuitions. But the discovery was very clear. And we ended up with a system in which the average of the six traits and the final intuition had equal weight. It sounds like what you recommend then concretely is for a manager to make a list of the skills and values that they're trying to select on to to do ratings that are anchored on those dimensions. So, you know, I might judge somebody who'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 want to 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. I think that's about right. It's such a powerful step that I think should bring the best of both worlds from algorithms and human judgment. There's something that's a little puzzling to me about it, though, which is why are managers and people in general so enamored with intuition? I think it's because people don't have an alternative. It's because when they try to reason their way to a conclusion. They end up confusing themselves. And so the intuition wins by default, it makes you feel good. It's easy to do and it's something that you can do quickly, whereas careful thinking in a 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 or 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 to the intuitive route , you'll end up with all, you know, with overconfident certainty and feeling good about yourself. So it's an easy choice. I think you you wrote about this topic at length and what some have called your magnum opus , thinking fast and slow. I'm wondering what you've rethought since you published that book. Well, 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 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 Dan Gilbert has a beautiful word equal that unbelieving and unbelieving things are very difficult. So I find it extremely hard to unbelieve aspects of Pozza 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 the individual differences. And all my career I I made fun of anybody 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, those studies that you have, it's not that everybody is behaving like the average of the study. That's simply false. There are different subgroups were doing different things. And 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 and, you know, doesn't have any implications for me because it's too late for me to study individual differences. And I wouldn't like doing it anyway. It's not my style. But I think there is much more room for it than I thought when I was writing, thinking fast and slow. Another thing I wanted to ask you about is the choices you make about what problems and projects to work on. I'm not a good example for anybody. I really never had a plan. A more or less followed my nose and I did many things that I shouldn't have done. I wasted a lot of time on projects that I shouldn't have carried out, but. No, I've been lucky. Well, I think that that's probably an encouraging message for a lot of us, that 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 to an idea in my book, I'm going to use that this is an area where I think there might be gold and I want to look for it. Such a nice reframe. So, Danny, you mentioned in your new book, Noize, one of my favorite ideas when I read Noise was the idea of the inner crowd. And I wondered if you could explain that there have been two lines of research by Bulan Besner and by her Twigg. And asking people the same question. On two occasions or in two different friends of mine, and it turns out that when you ask the same question like an estimate of the number of airports, when you ask people the same question twice separated by some time, then they tend to give you a different answers. And the average of the answers is more accurate than each of them separately. Also, in the case that the first answer is more valid than the second, and it's also the case, 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 are sampling from our mind. We are not extracting the answers from our mind. We are sampling an answer from our mind. And there are many different ways that that sample could come out. And sampling twice, especially if you will make them independent sampling twice is going to be better than sampling once. This is this is one of the most practical, unexpected decision making and judgment perspectives that I've come across in the last few years, in part because it says, I don't always need a second opinion if I can get better at forming my own second opinions. Oh, you know, I think as we say in that chapter sleepover, it is really very much the same thing that is sleepover. And just wait. And tomorrow you might think differently. So the advice is out there reinforcing it, maybe useful. Your collaboration with Amos Tversky is obviously legendary, there's a whole Michael Lewis book about it. Is there a lesson that you took away from that collaboration that's informed either how you choose your collaborators now or how you work with the people on your team? I think that one really important thing in is. It's to be genuinely interested in what your collaborator is say, and, you know, I am quite competitive. I'm also quite competitive. We were not competitive when we worked together. The joy of love, of collaboration for me always was that. But that almost that was more with them than with almost anyone else. I would say something and he would understand it better than I had. And that's the greatest joy of collaboration. But in my other collaborations, taking pleasure in the ideas of your collaborator seemed to be very useful, and I've been lucky that way. On that note, almost anyone who's ever won a Nobel Prize has complained that it hurt their career. And I've wondered what the experience has been like for you or I mean, it hurts people's career if they're young. You know, I got mine when I was 68, and for me it was a net loss. Why does it get people in trouble if they get it earlier? Oh, you know, there are a variety of ways that this can happen in the first place. It's very destructive. I mean, people start taking you more seriously than they did and hanging on your every word and a lot of nonsense like this. 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 are invited to do when you get a Nobel, which is a lot of talking and a lot of talking and think 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 is not the best gift. I was at a good age to get it because I had some years left in my career and it made many things much easier having a Nobel and it made the end of my career more productive, I think, and and happier than it would have been otherwise. Taken for granted as part of the TED Audio Collective, the show is hosted by Adam Grant and it's produced by TED with Transmitted Media. Our team includes Colin Helmes, Credit, Dan O'Donnell, Constanza Gelada, Joanne DeLuna, Grace Rubenstein, Michelle Quint and Ben Chang and Anna Feeling. This episode was produced by Dan O'Donnell.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


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ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
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Important Words


  1. ability
  2. absolutely
  3. abundant
  4. accept
  5. accepted
  6. accurate
  7. achievable
  8. achieved
  9. acknowledged
  10. adam
  11. added
  12. advice
  13. age
  14. agree
  15. airports
  16. algorithms
  17. aligned
  18. alleviation
  19. alternative
  20. ambivalence
  21. amos
  22. amount
  23. analytical
  24. anchored
  25. anna
  26. answer
  27. answers
  28. apocryphal
  29. applies
  30. approach
  31. area
  32. argued
  33. army
  34. arrive
  35. asked
  36. aspect
  37. aspects
  38. associate
  39. attention
  40. attitude
  41. audio
  42. automatically
  43. average
  44. avoidable
  45. awful
  46. background
  47. bad
  48. based
  49. basically
  50. beautiful
  51. beautifully
  52. beginning
  53. begun
  54. behaving
  55. behavioral
  56. beliefs
  57. believing
  58. ben
  59. benefits
  60. besner
  61. bias
  62. biases
  63. big
  64. bit
  65. board
  66. book
  67. bring
  68. broader
  69. broke
  70. build
  71. bulan
  72. call
  73. called
  74. candidate
  75. candidates
  76. capable
  77. care
  78. career
  79. careful
  80. carried
  81. case
  82. cases
  83. cass
  84. certainty
  85. challenge
  86. challenged
  87. chang
  88. changed
  89. changing
  90. chapter
  91. character
  92. characterizing
  93. choice
  94. choices
  95. choose
  96. circumstances
  97. claiming
  98. clear
  99. close
  100. coding
  101. coexist
  102. cognitive
  103. coin
  104. colin
  105. collaboration
  106. collaborations
  107. collaborator
  108. collaborators
  109. collective
  110. combat
  111. coming
  112. commitment
  113. compared
  114. competitive
  115. complained
  116. completed
  117. completely
  118. complicated
  119. comprehensive
  120. compulsive
  121. compulsively
  122. concentrate
  123. concentrated
  124. concept
  125. conceptualization
  126. conclusion
  127. conclusions
  128. concretely
  129. condition
  130. confirmation
  131. confirming
  132. confusing
  133. conscious
  134. conservative
  135. constanza
  136. consulted
  137. context
  138. contrarian
  139. contributing
  140. conversation
  141. conviction
  142. cool
  143. core
  144. corner
  145. correct
  146. countries
  147. courage
  148. covert
  149. created
  150. credit
  151. criteria
  152. critique
  153. crowd
  154. curious
  155. dan
  156. daniel
  157. danny
  158. data
  159. day
  160. days
  161. deal
  162. dealing
  163. decide
  164. decided
  165. deciding
  166. decision
  167. decisions
  168. decreasing
  169. deeply
  170. default
  171. degree
  172. delay
  173. delaying
  174. deluna
  175. demon
  176. depends
  177. describe
  178. describing
  179. deserves
  180. designed
  181. destructive
  182. detached
  183. detachment
  184. detail
  185. detected
  186. determine
  187. dichotomy
  188. difference
  189. differences
  190. differentiated
  191. differently
  192. difficult
  193. dime
  194. dimension
  195. dimensions
  196. direct
  197. directed
  198. directions
  199. discover
  200. discovering
  201. discovery
  202. dispassionate
  203. dissertation
  204. distinction
  205. distinguish
  206. doctoral
  207. documented
  208. dozen
  209. drawing
  210. earlier
  211. early
  212. easier
  213. easy
  214. economics
  215. economist
  216. economists
  217. effects
  218. elevating
  219. eminent
  220. emotion
  221. emotional
  222. emotions
  223. employee
  224. enamored
  225. encourage
  226. encouraging
  227. ended
  228. endorsed
  229. energy
  230. engaged
  231. engagement
  232. enjoy
  233. enjoyable
  234. enjoyed
  235. environment
  236. episode
  237. equal
  238. estimate
  239. ethic
  240. expected
  241. experience
  242. experiences
  243. experiencing
  244. experiment
  245. expert
  246. explain
  247. explaining
  248. explicit
  249. extent
  250. extracting
  251. extremely
  252. eyes
  253. factual
  254. failed
  255. failing
  256. fall
  257. fallacies
  258. false
  259. fascinating
  260. fast
  261. favor
  262. favorite
  263. feedback
  264. feel
  265. feeling
  266. feels
  267. field
  268. figure
  269. final
  270. financial
  271. find
  272. finished
  273. fit
  274. fixed
  275. flip
  276. flipped
  277. flipping
  278. focus
  279. focusing
  280. follow
  281. form
  282. formal
  283. formed
  284. forming
  285. forms
  286. formulating
  287. friend
  288. friends
  289. fun
  290. gallup
  291. gathered
  292. gave
  293. gelada
  294. general
  295. generally
  296. generosity
  297. genuinely
  298. gift
  299. gilbert
  300. give
  301. god
  302. gold
  303. good
  304. grace
  305. grant
  306. granted
  307. great
  308. greatest
  309. ground
  310. grounds
  311. group
  312. growing
  313. guess
  314. guide
  315. guilty
  316. habits
  317. handle
  318. hanging
  319. happen
  320. happier
  321. happiness
  322. happy
  323. hard
  324. hat
  325. hated
  326. health
  327. healthier
  328. hear
  329. heard
  330. helmes
  331. hesitating
  332. heuristics
  333. hey
  334. high
  335. highlighting
  336. highly
  337. hire
  338. hiring
  339. hold
  340. hope
  341. hoping
  342. hosted
  343. human
  344. humility
  345. hurt
  346. hurts
  347. hypothesis
  348. idea
  349. ideas
  350. identified
  351. identity
  352. implications
  353. implicit
  354. important
  355. impressed
  356. impression
  357. includes
  358. increase
  359. increasing
  360. indecision
  361. independent
  362. indicating
  363. individual
  364. influenced
  365. influential
  366. information
  367. informed
  368. innovating
  369. instructive
  370. integrity
  371. interest
  372. interested
  373. interesting
  374. interpretation
  375. interview
  376. interviewer
  377. interviewers
  378. interviewing
  379. interviews
  380. intrinsic
  381. intrinsically
  382. introduced
  383. intuition
  384. intuitions
  385. intuitive
  386. invited
  387. involved
  388. irrational
  389. irrationality
  390. irrationally
  391. irritating
  392. israeli
  393. issues
  394. joanne
  395. job
  396. joke
  397. journalist
  398. joy
  399. judge
  400. judgment
  401. jump
  402. jumping
  403. justice
  404. kahneman
  405. kind
  406. kinds
  407. labeled
  408. languishing
  409. large
  410. late
  411. lead
  412. leaders
  413. leading
  414. learn
  415. learning
  416. leaves
  417. led
  418. left
  419. legendary
  420. length
  421. lesson
  422. letting
  423. lewis
  424. life
  425. light
  426. lines
  427. list
  428. literature
  429. live
  430. lives
  431. long
  432. longer
  433. loss
  434. lost
  435. lot
  436. love
  437. luck
  438. lucky
  439. magnum
  440. main
  441. making
  442. manager
  443. managers
  444. map
  445. mark
  446. matter
  447. meaning
  448. measure
  449. measuring
  450. media
  451. mental
  452. mentioned
  453. message
  454. messenger
  455. michael
  456. michelle
  457. mind
  458. mindset
  459. miserable
  460. misery
  461. missed
  462. mistake
  463. mistakes
  464. model
  465. moment
  466. moral
  467. motivated
  468. motivation
  469. movement
  470. named
  471. necessity
  472. negative
  473. net
  474. nice
  475. nobel
  476. noise
  477. noize
  478. nonsense
  479. nose
  480. note
  481. number
  482. objective
  483. oblivious
  484. observe
  485. obsessed
  486. obsession
  487. occasions
  488. odd
  489. olivier
  490. opinion
  491. opinions
  492. opposed
  493. optimism
  494. option
  495. opus
  496. organisational
  497. organization
  498. organizational
  499. overconfident
  500. overinvest
  501. pain
  502. painful
  503. palpable
  504. pandemic
  505. panic
  506. part
  507. passionate
  508. passionately
  509. pattern
  510. patterns
  511. pay
  512. people
  513. percent
  514. persisted
  515. persistence
  516. persistent
  517. personally
  518. perspectives
  519. picked
  520. pieces
  521. place
  522. places
  523. plan
  524. play
  525. pleasure
  526. podcast
  527. point
  528. policies
  529. policy
  530. poll
  531. population
  532. populations
  533. position
  534. positive
  535. possibly
  536. powerful
  537. pozza
  538. practical
  539. practice
  540. preacher
  541. predictable
  542. prediction
  543. predictor
  544. prematurely
  545. present
  546. prevents
  547. prize
  548. problem
  549. problems
  550. produced
  551. productive
  552. programmer
  553. projects
  554. promoting
  555. prosecutor
  556. psychologist
  557. psychologists
  558. psychology
  559. published
  560. pursuing
  561. put
  562. puzzling
  563. quality
  564. question
  565. questions
  566. quickly
  567. quint
  568. quoted
  569. raised
  570. rare
  571. rate
  572. rates
  573. ratings
  574. rationalizing
  575. reaction
  576. read
  577. realizing
  578. reason
  579. recognition
  580. recognize
  581. recommend
  582. record
  583. reduce
  584. reducing
  585. reframe
  586. regular
  587. reinforcing
  588. related
  589. relationship
  590. relevant
  591. relieved
  592. rely
  593. remember
  594. reminds
  595. report
  596. research
  597. researcher
  598. resources
  599. responsibility
  600. responsible
  601. rest
  602. rethink
  603. rethought
  604. rigorously
  605. rna
  606. robots
  607. room
  608. route
  609. rubenstein
  610. salesperson
  611. salient
  612. sample
  613. sampling
  614. satisfying
  615. scarce
  616. scholar
  617. science
  618. scientist
  619. scientists
  620. scoring
  621. season
  622. sebti
  623. seeking
  624. select
  625. sell
  626. sense
  627. separated
  628. separately
  629. series
  630. set
  631. setting
  632. share
  633. shocked
  634. shortness
  635. show
  636. side
  637. significant
  638. simply
  639. single
  640. situation
  641. situations
  642. sixth
  643. skills
  644. sleepover
  645. slow
  646. small
  647. social
  648. society
  649. soldier
  650. solve
  651. sort
  652. sound
  653. sounds
  654. sources
  655. speak
  656. speaks
  657. special
  658. specific
  659. spend
  660. spent
  661. spring
  662. stand
  663. start
  664. started
  665. state
  666. states
  667. stay
  668. step
  669. story
  670. straight
  671. strong
  672. stronger
  673. struggle
  674. student
  675. students
  676. studied
  677. studies
  678. study
  679. studying
  680. style
  681. subconscious
  682. subgroups
  683. substitutes
  684. success
  685. successes
  686. successful
  687. suddenly
  688. suffering
  689. suitability
  690. sunstein
  691. surprised
  692. system
  693. systems
  694. talk
  695. talking
  696. task
  697. taught
  698. teachable
  699. team
  700. technology
  701. ted
  702. tenacity
  703. tend
  704. tension
  705. test
  706. thinking
  707. thought
  708. thrive
  709. time
  710. times
  711. today
  712. told
  713. tomorrow
  714. topic
  715. topics
  716. toss
  717. tough
  718. trace
  719. tracks
  720. trade
  721. trained
  722. traits
  723. transmitted
  724. trapped
  725. trouble
  726. true
  727. trust
  728. turned
  729. turning
  730. turns
  731. tversky
  732. twigg
  733. twist
  734. uk
  735. ultimately
  736. um
  737. unbelieve
  738. unbelieving
  739. unbiased
  740. unchanging
  741. understand
  742. unexpected
  743. unfortunate
  744. units
  745. universal
  746. vaccine
  747. valid
  748. values
  749. variety
  750. version
  751. victim
  752. vividly
  753. wait
  754. wanted
  755. waste
  756. wasted
  757. watch
  758. ways
  759. weaker
  760. wear
  761. weight
  762. welfare
  763. wellbeing
  764. wins
  765. won
  766. wondered
  767. wondering
  768. word
  769. words
  770. work
  771. workaholic
  772. worked
  773. working
  774. worklife
  775. workplaces
  776. world
  777. worlds
  778. worried
  779. worry
  780. worth
  781. worthwhile
  782. worthy
  783. wow
  784. writing
  785. wrong
  786. wrote
  787. yeah
  788. years
  789. young