I will never know if my vocation as a psychologist was a result of my early exposure to interesting gossip, or whether my interest in gossip was an indication of a budding vocation. Like many other Jews, I suppose, I grew up in a world that consisted exclusively of people and words, and most of the words were about people.  . . . the people my mother liked to talk about with her friends and with my father were fascinating in their complexity. Some people were better than others, but the best were far from perfect and no one was simply bad. 

– Daniel Kahneman, Autobiography Upon Winning the Nobel Prize

In 2002, Psychologist Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize for his work in Behavioral Economics. One of the more remarkable things about his acceptance speech and the brief autobiography he submitted upon winning the prize is the care he took to acknowledge the contributions of other people to his life’s work – work which has mapped out two systems of human thinking – the fast (intuitive) and the slow (deliberative) – and the many pitfalls each is subject to. 

This was no “I want to thank all the little people” Oscars toast. As a researcher and theorist Kahneman has dedicated his life to exposing the illusions that color all human judgment, including his own. In a sense, he and his colleagues have been at war for decades with our tendency to lie to ourselves. And judging from his own clear-eyed account of his work, his “adversarial collaboration” model for bridging fierce disagreements in the sciences, and the profound influence his work has exerted on how psychologists and economists think about decision-making, Kahneman is winning. 

The Illusion of Validity

 As a young man, Kahneman spent a year in the Psychology branch of the Israeli Defense Forces. He was tasked with identifying “leadership material” among officer training candidates. The test was a leaderless challenge in which eight candidates had to lift a telephone over a wall without touching the pole to the ground or the wall, and without making contact with the wall themselves. One or two natural leaders inevitably emerged and took charge of the situation. Case closed, right? Not exactly.  

Kahneman: We were looking for manifestations of the candidates' characters, and we saw plenty: true leaders, loyal followers, empty boasters, wimps - there were all kinds. Under the stress of the event, we felt, the soldiers' true nature would reveal itself, and we would be able to tell who would be a good leader and who would not. But the trouble was that, in fact, we could not tell. Every month or so we had a "statistics day," during which we would get feedback from the officer-training school, indicating the accuracy of our ratings of candidates' potential. The story was always the same: our ability to predict performance at the school was negligible.