Daniel Kahneman

One man's quest into how people think

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Jack Needham & Will Caplan
April 1st, 2024 • Reading Time: 9 minutes

Quick PSA: We’ve rebranded from The Breakdown to Change Makers. We tell the stories of the businesses and people who are changing the world.

👉 Read on to hear about:

  • Someone called Linda

  • An encounter with the Nazis

  • A confrontation with Israeli soldiers

  • A partnership of a generation

Hello Change Makers, please answer the question below to the best of your ability:

Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright. She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.

Which is more probable?

  1. Linda is a bank teller.

  2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement

My artistic interpretation of Linda

The answer to the question is 1 and 85% of people get this wrong (my rubbish drawing usually isn’t there). This is called the Conjunction Fallacy and it happens when we believe two or more combined conclusions of the same set are more probable than just one. 

Put more simply, it is unlikely that Linda is a bank teller, but it is even more unlikely she is a bank teller and at the same time is active in the feminist movement. 

What does Linda have to do with anything?

This week, Daniel Kahneman, the father of behavioural economics died at the age of 90. He thought up “The Linda Problem,” with Amon Tverstky and he is the kind of Change Maker who has greatly impacted the world without you knowing it. 

How and why people make decisions was a relatively unexplored field before Kahneman, paving the way for other pioneering behavioural economists like Richard Thaler. Huge companies and governments now have whole teams of behavioural economists trying to understand how people will react to policies.

You and I will likely have decided something because someone read Kahneman’s research and put together a policy that influenced our behaviour. The craziest part is you and I have no idea it happened. 

Who is Daniel Kahneman?

Daniel Kahneman was born in 1934 in Tel Aviv but lived in Paris for the first decade of his life. He recounts being fascinated by human behaviour as a young boy. He tells a story after the Germans had swept through France and occupied Paris, of playing with a Christian friend of his. By this time Jews were forced to wear the Star of David on their clothing. 

On his way back home from playing in the park, he put his jumper on inside out so no one could see his Star of David. About halfway back to his house, he saw a German soldier walking towards him. This soldier was wearing black. He had been told to fear the soldiers in black as they were part of the infamous SS division of the German army. You will have heard stories about how ruthless and brutal the SS could be toward Jews. Most of them are probably true. 

However, as Kahneman put it “he (the soldier) beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.”

Daniel Kahneman would spend his life studying human behavior worldwide, and pioneer the space of human decision-making and judgment with his long-time partner Amos Tversky. Both would win a Nobel Prize for their work. 

I want to give you two lessons from Daniel Kahneman that will help you be a better change maker.

Find other Change Makers

Doing something that brings about change can be incredibly lonely and difficult. One of the core characteristics of change is that many people will disagree with you. Humans have a desirability to keep things as they are, so forcing change upon the status quo will mean some people won’t like you. This can cause self-doubt and a waning belief in your ability; the feeling you aren’t good enough or might be wrong. 

One of the ways to combat this is to find other change makers: people who operate at the frontier. Daniel Kahneman did just that with Amos Tversky. Kahneman writes about his work with Amos saying “The experience was magical. I had enjoyed collaborative work before, but this was something different.”

A feature of these kinds of partnerships is the lack of desire for status. Neither of them cared about who was good at what or who had a specific idea first.

Kahneman writes “all our ideas were jointly owned. Our interactions were so frequent and so intense that there was never much point in distinguishing between the discussions that primed an idea, the act of uttering it, and the subsequent elaboration of it.” I think this sentence is awesome. 

He finished with “Amos and I shared the wonder of together owning a goose that could lay golden eggs – a joint mind that was better than our separate minds.”

We all say “I have no ego” but when most people say it they are lying. That dopamine rush you get when someone acknowledges your good idea or wins in an argument. It’s important to find other change makers and form a partnership so strong that these traits of the human ego fall away and create the space for new ideas. 

History is littered with these partnerships: Munger and Buffet, Allen and Gates, Procter and Gamble, Will and myself (lol). If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.

Embrace being wrong

Another trait of the human species is our desire to be right. This stems from the belief that our ideas are both scarce and good. When we have an idea and it is challenged, we believe 1. We are right and 2. That this rightness is a rarity, both of these make us feel like we need to protect the fledging thoughts. 

Daniel Kahneman describes a story when speaking to the Israeli Air Force when he realised he was wrong and how he felt.  He describes himself lecturing the group of instructors on how praise is better for performance than punishment.

At the end of this impassioned speech, a veteran instructor raises his hand and says “On many occasions, I have praised flight cadets for clean execution of some aerobatic maneuver, and in general when they try it again, they do worse. On the other hand, I have often screamed at cadets for bad execution, and in general, they do better the next time. So please don’t tell us that reinforcement works and punishment does not, because the opposite is the case.” This was a joyous moment”. 

The phenomenon the soldier describes is called regression to mean (not that the soldier knew this) and had nothing to do with praise or punishment. Imagine you put a target behind you and you have to throw a stone over your head and get it as close to the target as possible. If your first throw was close, your second throw will likely be less close. The opposite is also true, if your first throw is far away, it is likely your second throw will be closer. Cadets were merely going back to their average performance.

Now imagine for a second that you had just proposed this theory on praise and punishment and lectured stern-faced officers who are part of one of the world's most renowned fighting forces. And at the end of the lecture, your theory was publicly rejected and you were wrong. The cringe. Yet, Kahneman describes the moment as joyous.

The moment was joyous because Kahneman realised he was wrong and the officer was right. 

On a recent podcast with Adam Grant. Kahneman had this insight, “​​Ideas are not rare. This is generally true but not generally acknowledged.” The second you reformat your belief system in a way that acknowledges ideas are abundant, you no longer attach your identity to a given idea. 

As a change maker, our desire should be to uncover our wrongness and correct it, as fast as possible. Pursuing an idea that is wrong is more harmful to our goals than the public humiliation that comes from admitting our ignorance. 

Where to from here?

Last week the world lost one of the greatest psychologists ever. Daniel Kahneman’s contribution to the academic world is well documented and will never be forgotten, but what I enjoyed most were the stories of how Kahneman navigated his ideas and who he did it with.

In a world of noise, self-confidence and bravado, Kahneman walked through it with a humility and curiosity that made him a true Change Maker.

Some links to learn more:

Book: Noise → https://a.co/d/fyE91ta

Kahneman’s Ted Talk on Happiness —> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgRlrBl-7Yg