Professor Adam Berinsky on Thinking Fast and Slow (Alumni Books Podcast)

You're listening to the Slice of MIT Podcast, a production of the MIT Alumni Association.

This is the MIT Alumni Books Podcast. I'm Joe McGonigal, Director of Alumni Education. This month's book club pick is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, selected by Professor Adam Barinsky. You can join the book club at alum mit. Edu.

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Adam Barentsky is Professor of Political Science at MIT and serves as the Director of the MIT Political Experiments Research Lab. He's the author of In Time of Understanding American Public Opinion From World War II to Iraq, published in 2009, and most recently, editor of New Directions in Public Opinion, second edition, published in 2016 by Routledge. Professor Berensky, you chose Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. When asked what one book all MIT alumni should read, why choose this book?

Well, I think it's great. So Kahneman is a psychologist who won the Nobel Prize in Economics and speaks to social sciences more broadly. One reason I picked it, I think it's a fantastic book that talks about how it is that humans make decisions, how they think about their choices, and how most of the time that works out pretty well for us. But sometimes the kind of biases that we have in our thinking, the very same things that help us day to day, can make it very difficult to make big decisions. So Kamen sort of known for with his work with Amos Tversky about sort of uncovering biases in human judgment, what's forgotten about it. That is the reason that these kinds of biases exist is because they're coming off processes that really do help us day to day, kind of the thinking fast and slow. So he talks a lot about System one, which is kind of the more intuitive fast judgment, and System two, which is more deliberative. And System one sort of guides our decisions mostly day to day, mostly helps us out and make our judgments. But sometimes we could use a little more System two to kind of slow us down to make those decisions.

What a great student of psychology Kahneman is as an economist and a great reader. You can tell he has this buffet of psychological studies from over the years that leave readers jaws dropped. Did you put down the book when you first read it and think glass is half full for humanity, Glass is half empty?

I think a little of both. You know, I think I'm by nature maybe a little pessimist. I grew up in New York City, kind of sort of taught to think that way. And I think that most people, when they read Kahneman, kind of walk away with that sense of the Glass is half empty. He and Tversky, there's kind of a playfulness in some of their research. If you read their papers, you know, they take something of a delight in demonstrating the fallacies in human judgment. And I think that that's sort of what's remembered. But I think that there is a glass is heffel kind of thing as well, is that if we can be aware of these kinds of problems that these heuristics create, these kind of mental shortcuts in our day to day life, then, you know, we can kind of slow ourselves down and perhaps do something about. So I guess that we're not doomed to failure, we're not doomed to be guided by these heuristics. You know, most of the time, again, it serves us well. But in situations where perhaps it doesn't, it's good to kind of sit down and think hard about this. One example is something the prospect theory, you know, where they talk about how people are risk seeking in the domains of loss and risk averse in the domains of gains. And to realize that we're sort of hardwired to do that. You know, when we think about our day to day lives, to realize that, I think gives us an insight into the kinds of choices that we make. So, you know, if we're not aware, if we're not thinking slow about the decisions that we make, those kinds of biases override our judgments. But if we can kind of slow down and think, you know, why is it that I'm making this choice? I am. That there is the possibility of really correcting for that.

The chapter on Priming, he writes, the individual primed with money is prone to individualism and reluctance to be involved with others. And being reminded of one's mortality increases the appeal of authoritarian figures. Were you thinking of Kahneman a lot in 2016?

Well, I should say actually, one thing about that Priming chapter, and here it's nice to talk to an MIT audience that I can get a little more specific, is that a lot of the studies in the Priming chapter, not Kahneman's work, I mean, Kahneman's work is extremely well regarded, but some of the Priming studies he talks about have come under fire in recent years in psychology that there's something of a. I wouldn't call it a crisis, but there's a reexamining of a lot of foundational work in social psychology. So some of the priming, especially about sort of the, you know, if you read a list of words that are involved, old people, you get slower that that work's been questioned. So I just wanted to have readers be aware that there is, you know, if they hear something about a replication crisis in psychology, this is what people are talking about that, you know, Common's basic work on priming especially think about like the anchoring effect, that kind of where people are guided by the kinds of numbers that they hear that does alter their decisions. You know, I think that there are some lessons to think about in the election. Maybe not so much sort of the priming, but I'm thinking about kind of the risk aversion versus risk loss. So think about, you know, Trump is a risky candidate. You know, maybe he's more appealing to people. You know, for me, you know, as a social scientist, I'm interested in how ordinary people navigate the political world. And the fact that there are these kind of quirks of judgment that can short circuit a lot of the decisions that people make is important, especially because in politics. The line I use when I talk about ordinary people in politics is that most of the people most of the time don't pay a lot of attention to the political world. You know, I'm a political junkie. That's why I do what I do. A lot of people I talk to are political junkies. But most people, politics is something that is peripheral to their day to day life and that's perfectly fine. It doesn't make sense for people to pay so much attention to politics. But what that means is that a lot of these kind of thinking fast things that can potentially short circuit what we think of as rational decisions are especially applicable in the political realm. And that's why I think, you know, like a lot of what Kahneman and Tversky talked about is so important here.

I read the news of your study in 2015 on debunking rumors in public opinion surveys. I'm sure you were thinking of systems one and two there, if not explicitly. But that plays into your work.

Actually, in that academic work, I draw a lot on the notion of fluency. The notion that something that is familiar feels more true just because we've heard it more often. And, you know, that's a big, a big chunk of what Kahneman talks about early in the book. There's been some criticism in psychology over the years that Kahneman Tversky's work are parlor games. Right? I can show you, I can trick people. But that's not true because, I mean, they're parlor games if that's the case with bite, because they affect ordinary decisions. Thinking about what I studied about death panels. The fact that just hearing a rumor several times makes it more familiar to someone and they're more likely to say it's true in politics, that has a huge implication.

And this has been the year of fake news, the last year.

Yes, I'm writing a book about rumors, and it's certainly a growth industry. So, yeah.

Kahneman seems obsessed with pointing out studies of Harvard students, studies of elite institutions. Even students at elite institutions couldn't recognize this. Almost like there's this undercurrent of subterfuge about elitism there. Do you think about that in teaching MIT students at an elite institution?

I teach public opinion. And when I found the most effective way to demonstrate things like question wording effects, the fact that small differences in the way that you ask survey questions can affect the answers that people get, is to actually try these out on the students. I used to teach at Princeton, it was the same sort of thing where people would say, oh, this is very interesting, but it would never happen to me. And so I would give out surveys at the beginning of the term, and I still do this sometimes, where I would say, I wouldn't tell students why I was doing it, but I would demonstrate the kinds of question wording effects that they read about using them. So, you know, giving half the people I would ask them about spending on the poor, and the other half of the people I would ask about spending on welfare. And it turns out, not surprisingly, because welfare is kind of a loaded term, even though it is essentially the same concept, when you ask people about spending on welfare, support is much less. You know, I've done this experiment with my students probably 15 times over the last two decades I've been teaching. And it's always the case that I can replicate those effects in Princeton students, MIT students, and going back when I was a grad student at Michigan, Michigan students. So with it so much anti elitism, but it's sort of. It's nice to be able to show people that even people who are successful, intellectually, very successful at school still fall prey to these basic fallacies.

And I have to ask you about the public funding for schools when you're voting in a school and the voting is taking place in a school.

So it's actually, I have a friend of mine who's a political scientist has done this. And so, you know, it's not that all priming studies have failed, but just some of. Some of them have and then some haven't. But the school study is especially nice because it's been Replicated in the real world.

I was curious reading about intelligence and cognitive biases and so forth. What Kahneman's take on artificial intelligence is found his talk at Davos last month. He did speak about AI in an optimistic way that it would. That it would correct a lot of the biases. Any thoughts on that, as it might extend Kahneman's arguments?

I haven't seen that talk, but I know sort of the general argument that they've made and that social and cognitive psychologists have made, that in many ways having automated decision rules is better than expertise. Not in terms of that it will always give you the best decision, but it gives you a more regular decision rule that in some ways is a better guy than having an actual person make the decision, you know, in a way that. Not that you can program away the biases, but you can get people to focus on the, you know, the average behavior, the central tendency, the most likely situation, and kind of move people away from these heuristics that can at times lead them astray. So I think that there's a lot of potential. I think in the book, one of the parts that people who are new to the book refer them to is thinking about investments and the fact that basically it's the case that no one can beat the stock market in the long term, so the best thing to do is have diversified funds. He does studies where he finds that basically your success in the previous year is not at all predictive of your success next year. All my money is in diversified funds. I guess I'm walking the walk as well as talking the talk. That's really an automated decision. Basically, say you can chase the shiny object, but at the end of the day, over the long term, you're going to do no better than just the average. So why pay the fees that you would pay to a stock picker? Just bet the average instead and you'll do better.

Don't pick stocks that you can pronounce more easily. I think that was one of the.

Yes, yes. I guess another thing I want to say about this book is that this is a very dense book. There's been a rise recently in academics writing, popular press. Book things are meant for a more accessible audience. And there's no punches pulled here. You know, that this is. This is a book that, you know, I was familiar with Kahneman Tversky's work and Kahneman's work before I read this book, and it still took me a long time to get through it because it just. It's so dense, you know, he's a very good writer. It reads very well, but there's so much coming at you. So I would urge people that, you know, if you read a couple chapters and you feel a little drained, put it down for a while and then come back to it a week later. And I think that find some really good, fresh insights.

What else are you reading right now?

So right now I'm reading in addition to, like, all the academic papers that I read. So it's actually related to this book by Michael Lewis about Kahneman Tversky's relationship called the Undoing Project. So, you know, I'm a big fan of sort of academic memoir in a way, sort of hearing the stories behind the research, not just the research itself. And one disappointing thing for me about the Thinking Fast and Slow is that Kahneman doesn't talk a lot about his relationship with Tversky, doesn't talk a lot about the processes by which they came about their research. There's some early on, and then it disappears. What I really like about the Undoing Project is not only would I read anything that Michael Lewis writes because he's such a fantastic writer and makes complicated arguments, very understandable, but he gives the story about the personal relationship there. And, you know, it seems Kahneman is a very private man. He's a person who I think spends a lot of time criticizing himself and others. So after you read the Thinking Fast and Slow, I wouldn't read the Undoing Project first, but it kind of fleshes out the story of Thinking fast and Slow and made me realize why there wasn't that personal narrative there. Read in the Garden of the Beasts recently, too, which is about the American ambassador in early Nazi Germany, and that it's a little scary because I see a lot of parallels to today's day. So nothing happy or light, but I think all important and interesting.

The book is Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, and it's the subject of this month's Alumni Book Club. Professor Brunsky, thanks for joining me.

Good. Thank you.