EDGE Question 2015: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?

It's time again for the annual EDGE question for 2015 - What do you think about machines that think? Among this years respondents are many authors and thinkers who work in psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, and consciousness research. Here are a few:

Stanislas Dehaene, Alison Gopnik, Thomas Metzinger, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Andy Clark, Michael Shermer, Nicholas Humphrey, Gary Marcus, George Dyson, Paul Davies, Douglas Rushkoff, Helen Fisher, Stuart A. Kauffman, Robert Sapolsky, Maria Popova, Steven Pinker, and many others - 186 in all.

2015 : WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?

Contributors [ 185 ]  |  View All Responses [ 182 ]

"Dahlia" by Katinka Matson |  Click to Expand | www.katinkamatson.com

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In recent years, the 1980s-era philosophical discussions about artificial intelligence (AI)—whether computers can "really" think, refer, be conscious, and so on—have led to new conversations about how we should deal with the forms that many argue actually are implemented. These "AIs", if they achieve "Superintelligence" (Nick Bostrom), could pose "existential risks" that lead to "Our Final Hour" (Martin Rees). And Stephen Hawking recently made international headlines when he noted "The development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race."   

THE EDGE QUESTION—2015 

WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?

But wait! Should we also ask what machines that think, or, "AIs", might be thinking about? Do they want, do they expect civil rights? Do they have feelings? What kind of government (for us) would an AI choose? What kind of society would they want to structure for themselves? Or is "their" society "our" society? Will we, and the AIs, include each other within our respective circles of empathy?

Numerous Edgies have been at the forefront of the science behind the various flavors of AI, either in their research or writings. AI was front and center in conversations between charter members Pamela McCorduck (Machines Who Think) and Isaac Asimov (Machines That Think) at our initial meetings in 1980. And the conversation has continued unabated, as is evident in the recent Edge feature "The Myth of AI", a conversation with Jaron Lanier, that evoked rich and provocative commentaries.

Is AI becoming increasingly real? Are we now in a new era of the "AIs"? To consider this issue, it's time to grow up. Enough already with the science fiction and the movies, Star Maker, Blade Runner, 2001, Her, The Matrix, "The Borg".  Also, 80 years after Turing's invention of his Universal Machine, it's time to honor Turing, and other AI pioneers, by giving them a well-deserved rest. We know the history. (See George Dyson's 2004 Edge feature "Turing's Cathedral".) So, once again, this time with rigor, the Edge Question—2105: WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT MACHINES THAT THINK?

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[182 Responses—126,000 words:] Pamela McCorduck, George Church, James J. O'Donnell, Carlo Rovelli, Nick Bostrom, Daniel C. Dennett, Donald Hoffman, Roger Schank, Mark Pagel, Frank Wilczek, Robert Provine, Susan Blackmore, Haim Harari, Andy Clark, William Poundstone, Peter Norvig, Rodney Brooks, Jonathan Gottschall, Arnold Trehub, Giulio Boccaletti, Michael Shermer, Chris DiBona, Aubrey De Grey, Juan Enriquez, Satyajit Das, Quentin Hardy, Clifford Pickover, Nicholas Humphrey, Ross Anderson, Paul Saffo, Eric J. Topol, M.D., Dylan Evans, Roger Highfield, Gordon Kane, Melanie Swan, Richard Nisbett, Lee Smolin, Scott Atran, Stanislas Dehaene, Stephen Kosslyn, Emanuel Derman, Richard Thaler, Alison Gopnik, Ernst Pöppel, Luca De Biase, Maraget Levi, Terrence Sejnowski, Thomas Metzinger, D.A. Wallach, Leo Chalupa, Bruce Sterling, Kevin Kelly, Martin Seligman, Keith Devlin, S. Abbas Raza, Neil Gershenfeld, Daniel Everett, Douglas Coupland, Joshua Bongard, Ziyad Marar, Thomas Bass, Frank Tipler, Mario Livio, Marti Hearst, Randolph Nesse, Alex (Sandy) Pentland, Samuel Arbesman, Gerald Smallberg, John Mather, Ursula Martin, Kurt Gray, Gerd Gigerenzer, Kevin Slavin, Nicholas Carr, Timo Hannay, Kai Krause, Alun Anderson, Seth Lloyd, Mary Catherine Bateson, Steve Fuller, Virginia Heffernan, Barbara Strauch, Sean Carroll, Sheizaf Rafaeli, Edward Slingerland, Nicholas Christakis, Joichi Ito, David Christian, George Dyson, Paul Davies, Douglas Rushkoff, Tim O'Reilly, Irene Pepperberg, Helen Fisher, Stuart A. Kauffman, Stuart Russell, Tomaso Poggio, Robert Sapolsky, Maria Popova, Martin Rees, Lawrence M. Krauss, Jessica Tracy & Kristin Laurin, Paul Dolan, Kate Jefferey, June Gruber & Raul Saucedo, Bruce Schneier, Rebecca MacKinnon, Antony Garrett Lisi, Thomas Dietterich, John Markoff, Matthew Lieberman, Dimitar Sasselov, Michael Vassar, Gregory Paul, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Andrian Kreye, Andrés Roemer, N.J. Enfield, Rolf Dobelli, Nina Jablonski, Marcelo Gleiser, Gary Klein, Tor Nørretranders, David Gelernter, Cesar Hidalgo, Gary Marcus, Sam Harris, Molly Crockett, Abigail Marsh, Alexander Wissner-Gross, Koo Jeong-A, Sarah Demers, Richard Foreman, Julia Clarke, Georg Diez, Jaan Tallinn, Michael McCullough, Hans Halvorson, Kevin Hand, Christine Finn, Tom Griffiths, Dirk Helbing, Brian Knutson, John Tooby, Maximilian Schich, Athena Vouloumanos, Brian Christian, Timothy Taylor, Bruce Parker, Benjamin Bergen, Laurence Smith, Ian Bogost, W. Tecumseh Fitch, Michael Norton, Scott Draves, Gregory Benford, Chris Anderson, Raphael Bousso, Christopher Chabris, James Croak, Beatrice Golomb, Moshe Hoffman, Matt Ridley, Matthew Ritchie, Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran, Eldar Shafir, Maria Spiropulu, Tania Lombrozo, Bart Kosko, Joscha Bach, Esther Dyson, Anthony Aguirre, Steve Omohundro, Murray Shanahan, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Steven Pinker, Max Tegmark, Jon Kleinberg & Senhil Mullainathan, Freeman Dyson, Brian Eno, W. Daniel Hillis, Katinka Matson

Social Pain: A Conversation with Naomi Eisenberger

Here is a new Conversations at Edge with Naomi Eisenberger, a professor in the Social Psychology program at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is director of the Social and Affective Neuroscience laboratory as well as co-director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory.

Dr. Eisenberger was featured in an earlier Conversations at Edge on Why Rejection Hurts [7.6.11].

Social Pain

A Conversation with Naomi Eisenberger [9.10.14]
Topic: Conversations

When I think of the work on social pain, and showing that some of the same neural regions that are involved in physical pain are involved in social pain, that can be very validating for people. For anyone who's felt the pain of losing somebody or who's felt the hurt feelings that come from being ostracized or bullied, there's something very validating in seeing this scientific work that shows it's not just in our head. It is in our head because it's in our brain. It's not just in our head, there is something biological going on that's interpreting the pain of social rejection as something that really is a painful experience. 


NAOMI EISENBERGER is a professor in the Social Psychology program at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is director of the Social and Affective Neuroscience laboratory as well as co-director of the Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory.

Naomi Eisenberger's Edge Bio Page

SOCIAL PAIN

The kinds of questions that I'm interested in have to do with the feelings that come up in our closest social relationships. I've been on both sides of this equation, the negative side and the positive side. I've been very curious about both the painful feelings that we have when we lose our closest social relationships or we feel disconnected from others, as well as the pleasurable feelings that we have when we feel close and connected to those that we love. One of the things that we've been exploring in my Lab at UCLA is where those feelings come from. One way that we've been doing this is by turning to the brain to try to understand those feelings of social closeness or social distance.

We started off on the negative side. I started off with this question of: why do people talk about feeling hurt by social rejection? Why do they talk about the pain that comes up when they feel left out or excluded? It's a very palpable experience. Most people, if you ask them to think back to some very painful event in their life, instead of bringing up something that involves a broken bone they’ll often bring up an experience that involves losing a social relationship or being rejected. We all have these memories of being left out on the school playground or fears of being left out on the school playground. So I was very curious. Where do those fears and where do those feelings come from?

(29:23 minutes)

 

To explore this we essentially created a setting, created a situation that we could expose our subjects to, see what's going on emotionally when people feel rejected, and then what's going on in their brains when they experience this state. In this first study we brought people in to the fMRI scanner and had them play a virtual ball tossing game with two other supposed subjects. They thought they were playing this interactive game together. It turns out they weren't actually playing with two other people, but they didn’t know this yet. What happened during this game is that these two computer players stopped throwing the ball to our subjects so we could look at the brain and see what's going on for these individuals, what's going on in their brains when they're being rejected compared to when they're being included in the game.

What we found here was really interesting, that some of the same regions of the brain that process the painful experience—the distressing component of physical pain—are the same regions that seem to activate when people feel socially excluded. It gives some weight to this idea that rejection really can be painful. The same regions that process the unpleasantness of physical pain process the pain of social exclusion. This got us thinking about the overlap, the possible shared neural circuitry underlying physical and social pain. Maybe the same regions that process physical pain have been borrowed over the course of our evolutionary history to process social pain.

When you think about us as a social species, this actually makes quite a lot of sense. We rely on people, we need to be close to others, especially early on for protection, for care, for nourishment. To the extent that being separated from a caregiver or from a close other is such a threat to our survival, then actually feeling this pain signal when we're separated may be an adaptive way to prevent being socially separated.

We've gone on to explore some of this shared circuitry. We've tested a few ideas that come from it. One idea is that if physical pain and social pain really rely on some of the same neural regions, then one consequence of this is that people who tend to be more sensitive to physical pain should also tend to be more sensitive to social pain, and we've been able to show this in a few studies. We found that subjects who, at baseline, are naturally more sensitive to physical pain are the ones who later on report feeling more rejected by the same virtual ball tossing game where they get excluded.

We've also seen some genetic evidence for this. We find that people who carry the more rare version of the mu-opioid gene, which is linked to a greater sensitivity to physical pain (opioids are potent painkillers), are individuals who have a genetic disposition to be more sensitive to physical pain. These are the same individuals who report feeling more upset by social rejection; they show greater pain related neural activity in response to social exclusion.

A second consequence of this overlap that we've been exploring is whether certain factors that alter one kind of pain can alter the other in a similar manner, and probably one of the most interesting studies we've done is one where we looked at acetaminophen. We typically think of acetaminophen as a physical painkiller. In this particular study, we randomly assigned people to either take it everyday for two weeks or take a placebo everyday for two weeks. Instead of measuring their physical pain, we measured their social pain. We asked them each evening to rate their hurt feelings. We also then brought them in at the end of a separate study to look at their neural sensitivity to social exclusion. What we found is that the people who were taking acetaminophen reported less hurt feelings than people who were taking placebo, and they showed less pain related activity to social exclusion, just as a function of taking acetaminophen. We see this crossover effect in some ways, that this agent, which known to reduce physical pain, also seems to affect social pain.

Those are some of the things that we've been looking at on the more negative side of social experience. I've also become very interested recently in exploring the positive feelings that come from our social connections, and these have probably been the trickiest to really emulate in the scanning environment. It's easy to put somebody into a negative state when they're laying alone in a contained structure. It's harder to really get people to feel connected to their close others when they're all alone in the dark in the fMRI scanner.

In the same way that we've been curious about some of the neural substrates that might have been borrowed to support our experience of social pain, we've also been interested in what neural substrates might have been borrowed to support those pleasurable, warm feelings that we have when we're feeling connected.

One kind of substrate that we've been really interested in are those neural substrates that process temperature. The reason for that is because a lot of times when we talk about our feelings of closeness or connection, we talk about warmth. We talk about somebody making us feel warmhearted, we talk about our warm feelings toward somebody, so we wondered whether some of the same mechanisms that process warmth—that lead us to feel sort of pleasantly warm about a physical object—are the same mechanisms that lead us to feel warm about somebody else.

In one study we brought people into the scanner, and we wanted, again, to look at overlapping neural activity between physical warmth and social warmth. To look at physical warmth, we have them holding onto one of those warm packs that athletes will use where they crack them open and shake them up and it produces warmth in the packet. We scanned people when they were holding warm packs and a neutral temperature pack, and we also scanned them while they were experiencing social warmth. To do this we had the participants’ family members and friends, before the scanning session, write email messages to the participants. These were loving, tender messages that the subjects saw for the first time when they were in the fMRI scanner. We looked at what the brain was doing when subjects were viewing these socially warm images and whether or not it overlapped with what was going on when they were feeling these physically warm packs.

What we found, first just in terms of their self reports, not surprisingly, people felt more warm when they were holding the packs. They also reported feeling more warm when they were reading those nice messages. What was also interesting is that subjects not only reported feeling more connected when they were reading those messages, they also strangely enough reported feeling more connected when they were simply holding those warm packs.

The last thing that we saw was neural activity in reward-related regions during both tasks, and it turned out that there were several regions that showed overlapping neural activity. Some of the same regions that are processing physical warmth and the pleasantness of that sensory experience were the same ones processing the social warmth that people are getting from these loving messages.

Another line of research on the positive side is our research exploring the neural substrates of support-giving. Essentially there's been a lot of work showing that social relationships are critical for health. Most of the time, though, when people ask why social support is critical for health they assume that it's because of all the support that we get from others. Less often have people really looked at the support that people give to others. So when you help out a friend, or you take care of somebody, or you offer to do a favor for a family member, this is not considered support really because it's not helping us. We're doing things for other people. But this actually may be a key ingredient helping to explain some of the relationship between social support and better health.

We've been interested in some of the neural underpinnings of this particular state. So we ran a study where we brought in couples, and the female member of the couple was in the fMRI scanner, and essentially we scanned her brain while she was providing support to her partner. Her partner stood just outside of the fMRI scanner, and on certain trials he received electric shock. The female could support him on some trials by holding his arm as he went through this experience. This was a form of giving support to help somebody going through something negative or something painful.

There were two main findings here. The first is that we saw reward-related activity when people were providing support to somebody else. Some people say this is not terribly surprising. We all know that something about support-giving feels good. Some people might say that seems surprising because we're actually doing work to help somebody else, but we did see reward-related activity. We actually saw more reward-related activity when the females were touching their partners when they were getting pain—when they were support-giving—compared to when they were just touching their partners and their partners weren't getting pain. It seems like maybe there was something more rewarding about being able to provide support than just being able to be in physical contact with your partner when they're not going through anything negative.

The last interesting finding was that the females who showed more reward-related activity when they were support-giving were also the ones who showed less activity in the amygdala. This is a region that's involved in a lot of different things, but one of the things that it's involved in is processing threat. People who showed more reward-related activity that were involved in support-giving seemed to be showing less threat-related activity

If you look into animal work and if you think about the evolutionary aspects of this, it makes some sense. The idea here is that to the extent that we're in a caregiving situation, we need to remain calm. There may be some circuitry in place that turns down our own threat sensitivity so that we can engage in adaptive caregiving towards others. There may be something about caregiving that actually turns down our own internal stress level so that we can engage and provide adaptive help to others.

We've been trying to build on this and to look at some of the health consequences of support-giving. Is there something about support-giving that's actually stress reducing for the person who's giving the support? Not just for the person who's receiving it, which is what's typically been looked at, but for the person who's doing the helping. We have some preliminary data where people write a helpful note to a friend in need. After doing so, they go through a stress task. Those people that wrote the helpful note, as opposed to people who wrote just a control note, actually showed a calmer physiological profile to the stress task. They were showing less of a heart rate increase, less of a blood pressure increase, just as a function of writing this helpful message to a friend.

~ ~

I've always honestly felt a bit like a mutt in terms of the fields that have influenced me. I would call myself now a social neuroscientist, but I was trained as a social psychologist with probably a large influence from health psychology as well. Unlike most social psychologists, I tend to read a lot more animal work, and that's probably from health psychology, which borrows a lot from animal models of disease and how different kinds of social environments can affect health outcomes. I don't think it's a field, but people who have studied social relationships using animal models, as well as human models, have also greatly influenced me.

Individuals who have influenced me include Harry Harlow, John Bowlby, and Jaak Panksepp—people who have focused on what makes up the glue that binds people together. You have Harry Harlow looking at very basic attachment processes...what does the monkey prefer? Does he prefer the food or does he prefer the warmth, or the softness? You have people like John Bowlby who's trying to chart out a mechanistic way for understanding attachment, a child’s attachment to its mother. Then you have people like Panksepp, who use animal models to understand basic motivational systems like love, attachment, rage, caregiving. Probably the central theme is people focused on social relationships, and not just romantic relationships.

There's a whole wing of social psychology that focuses on romantic relationships, and in some ways that's why I never consider myself a relationship researcher. I'm interested in more than just the romance. I'm interested in the friendships, I'm interested in the parent/child relationships, all of that. I've been probably more influenced by the folks who’ve studied social connection from humans to animals.                                       

I think romance is interesting and a lot of people study romance. There's a lot of other meaningful types of relationships out there that people, for some reason, seem to be less interested in. So when I think about the warm feelings that I have for my employees or my close friends or my son, I want to know where those come from.                 

~ ~

How do I know what I'm doing makes a difference? I have two answers. Some of my research makes a difference because it reveals something to people that they probably already knew but maybe were afraid to believe. When I think of the work on social pain, and showing that some of the same neural regions that are involved in physical pain are involved in social pain, that can be very validating for people. For anyone who's felt the pain of losing somebody or who's felt the hurt feelings that come from being ostracized or bullied, there's something very validating in seeing this scientific work that shows it's not just in our head. It is in our head because it's in our brain. It's not just in our head. There is something biological going on that's interpreting the pain of social rejection as something that really is a painful experience.

There is something inherently interesting about figuring out how people work, figuring out where these warm feelings come from, and I'm not sure in the end if it will help anyone. That line of research is almost meant to just understand these things and maybe not meant necessarily to help people in the end.                 

I was the kind of person that always wanted to know what I wanted to do, but I never did, and I happened upon science in a way. I met a mentor who was gracious enough to take me on. We did a project together, and I found something new, and literally it was that excitement of discovering something for the first time that led me to want to be a scientist.

This still drives me to this day, this moment of discovering something new about human experience that we didn’t know before, the "Ah-ha!" moments. That's what reinforces things, and perhaps that's a selfish reason to pursue science, but for me that's certainly part of it, that feeling of discovering something new.

~ ~

I got my Bachelor’s of Science at UCLA. I majored in psychobiology. It was there that I got my first taste of research, so I wound up doing an Honors Thesis with Margaret Kemeny, who's a health psychologist and also a psychoneuroimmunologist. Because of our work together I think I realized I really wanted to do science. I really wanted to be able to ask questions about human nature, about human experience, and then use the data to answer those questions. After finishing my Bachelor’s, I went to UCLA and got a Ph.D. there. I worked with Matt Lieberman (now my husband), with Shelley Taylor and with Shelly Gable. And I think at the time when I was in my second or third year of graduate school I was introduced by Matt Lieberman to this new area of science called social neuroscience.            
                              
Before that I was probably more of a health psychologist. I was very interested in why social ties are so important for health, and there were all of these fabulous demonstrations of people who have more friends live longer and they are less likely to get sick. But I always felt like there was something missing with those models, and to me that was what's going on in the mind that translates the social world into whatever happens downstream in the body.              
            
I became very interested in social neuroscience as a way to connect that outer social world with the inner workings of the body to try to better understand some of the links between social issues and health. I took whatever classes I could, talked with whoever I could to learn all these techniques of social neuroscience. It was during that time that I, with Matt, did the study on social pain, looking at Cyberball, looking at people getting excluded in the scanner. My work built from there, continuing to look at that idea that physical and social pain overlap.           
                               
In some ways I veered off to get training in social neuroscience. During my post-doc I came back to health again. So during my post-doc I worked with Michael Irwin who's a psychoneuroimmunologist, and here I did something pretty different than what I did before. I ran a pretty involved study where we injected people with an agent that triggers an inflammatory response to look at how that inflammatory response affects people emotionally and affects people socially and also what's going on neurally as a function of that.   

~ ~

I have two main thoughts about differences between males and females when it comes to academics. When I was in graduate school I never thought about gender differences in how I was treated versus how anyone else was treated. It wasn’t until I became an assistant professor tha I started to notice things. It was subtle things, like I felt when a male colleague presented on my data they didn’t get as many questions. When I presented on my data there were a lot more questions. I don’t mean questions about clarity, questions to clarify. I mean doubtful questions, like, "I don’t believe what you're saying." Those kinds of questions. I've spoken with other female colleagues who have said the same thing. If she gives the exact same lecture as her husband to a class of students, she finds that she gets a lot more pushback than her husband.

There's also social networking things. Matt talks to other males, I talk to other females. The males that he talks to, because I guess they're males, tend to be in more powerful positions. It's oftentimes males who are department chairs. So it's Matt that's talking about jobs, about people moving, and orchestrating things. He's the one who's networking and pushing for positions in different places.

That's one difference. Another thing that I've noticed, I've seen more of this in my students, is that the way that science is done is more male friendly. This is my opinion, so some people may disagree with this, but I have a lot of female students, and when they go to conferences and give talks and people ask them questions that are challenging, that are maybe mean spirited, it makes them want to disengage. Sometimes, for male students, they see this as an opportunity to engage, to fight back...it's fun to argue. I’ll watch two males fight it out over some scientific question and think, "Oh my God, they're never going to speak to each other again," and meanwhile, they're having a really fun time. So there's something accepted about the way science happens that's a bit more male-oriented than female-oriented, in terms of its confrontational aspects.             

The last thought that comes to mind is that I've often wondered if females are less interested—at least some females—in self-promoting. There is maybe something uncomfortable about this kind of activity, or that they're just less interested, that it's not as important to them to get their message out, to be heard by a lot of people, and that's certainly something that I've dealt with myself. I like to do my science. I like to discover things. I like for other people to know about it, but do I want to go out and have speaking gigs all the time and get in front of audiences? Something about that makes me uncomfortable. I don't know if that's a "me" thing or if that's a female thing. "Me" and female are confounded so I can't really pull those two things apart.                                                                          

Writing In The 21st Century: A Conversation with Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker, the beloved and sometimes infuriating evolutionary psychologist, has a new book out, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century (2014). Interesting choice. I have never thought of Pinker as an especially clear writer. But I guess after so many big serious books, he may have wanted to do something fun.

Writing In The 21st Century

A Conversation with Steven Pinker [6.9.14]

Topic: Conversations
Introduction By: John Brockman

What are the arts but products of the human mind which resonate with our aesthetic and emotional faculties? What are social issues, but ways in which humans try to coordinate their behavior and come to working arrangements that benefit everyone? There's no aspect of life that cannot be illuminated by a better understanding of the mind from scientific psychology. And for me the most recent example is the process of writing itself.


(37 minutes)

Introduction

Psychologist Steven Pinker's 1994 book The Language Instinct discussed all aspects of language in a unified, Darwinian framework, and in his next book, How The Mind Works he did the same for the rest of the mind, explaining "what the mind is, how it evolved, and how it allows us to see, think, feel, laugh, interact, enjoy the arts, and ponder the mysteries of life".

He has written four more consequential books: Words and Rules (1999), The Blank Slate (2002), The Stuff of Thought (2007), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011). The evolution in his thinking, and the expansion of his range, the depth of his vision, are evident in his contributions on many important issues on these pages over the years: "A Biological Understanding of Human Nature", "The Science of Gender and Science", "A Preface to Dangerous Ideas", "Language and Human Nature", "A History of Violence", "The False Allure of Group Selection", "Napoleon Chagnon: Blood Is Their Argument", and "Science Is Not Your Enemy". In addition to his many honors, he is the Edge Question Laureate, having suggested three of Edge's Annual Questions: "What Is Your Dangerous Idea?"; What Is Your Favorite Deep, Elegant, Or Beautiful Explanation?"; and "What Scientific Concept Would Improve Everybody's Cognitive Toolkit?". He is a consummate third culture intellectual.

In the conversation below, Pinker begins by stating his belief that "science can inform all aspects of life, particularly psychology, my own favorite science. Psychology looks in one direction to biology, to neuroscience, to genetics, to evolution. And it looks in another direction to the rest of intellectual and cultural life—because what are the arts but products of the human mind which resonate with our aesthetic and emotional faculties? What are social issues but ways in which humans try to coordinate their behavior and come to working arrangements that benefit everyone? There's no aspect of life that cannot be illuminated by a better understanding of the mind from scientific psychology. And for me the most recent example is the process of writing itself."...

—John Brockman

STEVEN PINKER is the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University. He is the author of ten books, including The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works, The Better Angels of Our Nature, and The Sense of Style (September). Steven Pinker's Edge Bio page

WRITING IN THE 21ST CENTURY

I believe that science can inform all aspects of life, particularly psychology, my own favorite science. Psychology looks in one direction to biology, to neuroscience, to genetics, to evolution. And it looks in another direction to the rest of intellectual and cultural life—because what are the arts but products of the human mind which resonate with our aesthetic and emotional faculties? What are social issues but ways in which humans try to coordinate their behavior and come to working arrangements that benefit everyone? There's no aspect of life that cannot be illuminated by a better understanding of the mind from scientific psychology. And for me the most recent example is the process of writing itself.

I'm a psychologist who studies language—a psycholinguist—and I'm also someone who uses language in my books and articles to convey ideas about, among other things, the science of language itself. But also, ideas about war and peace and emotion and cognition and human nature. The question I'm currently asking myself is how our scientific understanding of language can be put into practice to improve the way that we communicate anything, including science?

In particular, can you use linguistics, cognitive science, and psycholinguistics to come up with a better style manual—a 21st century alternative to the classic guides like Strunk and White's The Elements of Style?

Writing is inherently a topic in psychology. It's a way that one mind can cause ideas to happen in another mind. The medium by which we share complex ideas, namely language, has been studied intensively for more than half a century. And so if all that work is of any use it ought to be of use in crafting more stylish and transparent prose.

From a scientific perspective, the starting point must be different from that of traditional manuals, which are lists of dos and don'ts that are presented mechanically and often followed robotically. Many writers have been the victims of inept copy editors who follow guidelines from style manuals unthinkingly, never understanding their rationale.

For example, everyone knows that scientists overuse the passive voice. It's one of the signatures of academese: "the experiment was performed" instead of "I performed the experiment." But if you follow the guideline, "Change every passive sentence into an active sentence," you don't improve the prose, because there's no way the passive construction could have survived in the English language for millennia if it hadn't served some purpose.

The problem with any given construction, like the passive voice, isn't that people use it, but that they use it too much or in the wrong circumstances. Active and passive sentences express the same underlying content (who did what to whom) while varying the topic, focus, and linear order of the participants, all of which have cognitive ramifications. The passive is a better construction than the active when the affected entity (the thing that has moved or changed) is the topic of the preceding discourse, and should therefore come early in the sentence to connect with what came before; when the affected entity is shorter or grammatically simpler than the agent of the action, so expressing it early relieves the reader's memory load; and when the agent is irrelevant to the story, and is best omitted altogether (which the passive, but not the active, allows you to do). To give good advice on how to write, you have to understand what the passive can accomplish, and therefore you should not blue-pencil every passive sentence into an active one (as one of my copy editors once did).

Ironically, the aspect of writing that gets the most attention is the one that is least important to good style, and that is the rules of correct usage. Can you split an infinitive, that is, say, "to boldly go where no man has gone before,"or must you say to "go boldly"? Can you use the so-called fused participle—"I approve of Sheila taking the job"—as opposed to "I approve of Sheila's taking the job" (with an apostrophe "s")? There are literally (yes, "literally") hundreds of traditional usage issues like these, and many are worth following. But many are not, and in general they are not the first things to concentrate on when we think about how to improve writing.

The first thing you should think about is the stance that you as a writer take when putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard. Writing is cognitively unnatural. In ordinary conversation, we've got another person across from us. We can monitor the other person's facial expressions: Do they furrow their brow, or widen their eyes? We can respond when they break in and interrupt us. And unless you're addressing a stranger you know the hearer's background: whether they're an adult or child, whether they're an expert in your field or not. When you're writing you have none of those advantages. You're casting your bread onto the waters, hoping that this invisible and unknowable audience will catch your drift.

The first thing to do in writing well—before worrying about split infinitives—is what kind of situation you imagine yourself to be in. What are you simulating when you write, and you're only pretending to use language in the ordinary way? That stance is the main thing that iw distinguishes clear vigorous writing from the mush we see in academese and medicalese and bureaucratese and corporatese.

The literary scholars Mark Turner and Francis-Noël Thomas have identified the stance that our best essayists and writers implicitly adopt, and that is a combination of vision and conversation. When you write you should pretend that you, the writer, see something in the world that's interesting, that you are directing the attention of your reader to that thing in the world, and that you are doing so by means of conversation.

That may sound obvious. But it's amazing how many of the bad habits of academese and legalese and so on come from flouting that model. Bad writers don't point to something in the world but are self-conscious about not seeming naïve about the pitfalls of their own enterprise. Their goal is not to show something to the reader but to prove that they are not a bad lawyer or a bad scientist or a bad academic. And so bad writing is cluttered with apologies and hedges and "somewhats" and reviews of the past activity of people in the same line of work as the writer, as opposed to concentrating on something in the world that the writer is trying to get someone else to see with their own eyes.

That's a starting point to becoming a good writer. Another key is to be an attentive reader. One of the things you appreciate when you do linguistics is that a language is a combination of two very different mechanisms: powerful rules, which can be applied algorithmically, and lexical irregularities, which must be memorized by brute force: in sum, words and rules.

All languages contain elegant, powerful, logical rules for combining words in such a way that the meaning of the combination can be deduced from the meanings of the words and the way they're arranged. If I say "the dog bit the man" or "the man bit the dog," you have two different images, because of the way those words are ordered by the rules of English grammar.

On the other hand, language has a massive amount of irregularity: idiosyncrasies, idioms, figures of speech, and other historical accidents that you couldn't possibly deduce from rules, because often they are fundamentally illogical. The past tense of "bring" is "brought," but the past tense of "ring" is "rang," and the past tense of "blink" is "blinked." No rule allows you to predict that; you need raw exposure to the language. That's also true for many rules of punctuation. If I talk about "Pat's leg," it's "Pat-apostrophe-s." But If I talk about "its leg," I can't use apostrophe S; that would be illiterate. Why? Who knows? That's just the way English works. People who spell possessive "its" with an apostrophe are not being illogical; they're being too logical, while betraying the fact that they haven't paid close attention to details of the printed page.

So being a good writer depends not just on having mastered the logical rules of combination but on having absorbed tens or hundreds of thousands of constructions and idioms and irregularities from the printed page. The first step to being a good writer is to be a good reader: to read a lot, and to savor and reverse-engineer good prose wherever you find it. That is, to read a passage of writing and think to yourself, … "How did the writer achieve that effect? What was their trick?" And to read a good sentence with a consciousness of what makes it so much fun to glide through.

Any handbook on writing today is going to be compared to Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, a lovely little book, filled with insight and charm, which I have read many times. But William Strunk, its original author, was born in 1869. This is a man who was born before the invention of the telephone, let alone the computer and the Internet and the smartphone. His sense of style was honed in the later decades of the 19th century!

We know that language changes. You and I don't speak the way people did in Shakespeare's era, or in Chaucer's. As valuable as The Elements of Style is (and it's tremendously valuable), it's got a lot of cockamamie advice, dated by the fact that its authors were born more than a hundred years ago. For example, they sternly warn, "Never use 'contact' as a verb. Don't say 'I'm going to contact him.' It's pretentious jargon, pompous and self-important. Indicate that you intend to 'telephone' someone or 'write them' or 'knock on their door.'" To a writer in the 21st century, this advice is bizarre. Not only is "to contact" thoroughly entrenched and unpretentious, but it's indispensable. Often it's extremely useful to be able to talk about getting in touch with someone when you don't care by what medium you're going to do it, and in those cases, "to contact" is the perfect verb. It may have been a neologism in Strunk and White's day, but all words start out as neologisms in their day. If you read The Elements of Style today, you have no way of appreciating that what grated on the ears of someone born in 1869 might be completely unexceptionable today.

The other problem is that The Elements of Style was composed before there existed a science of language and cognition. A lot of Strunk and White's advice depended completely on their gut reactions from a lifetime of practice as an English professor and critic, respectively. Today we can offer deeper advice, such as the syntactic and discourse functions of the passive voice—a construction which, by the way, Strunk and White couldn't even consistently identify, not having being trained in grammar.

Another advantage of modern linguistics and psycholinguistics is that it provides a way to think your way through a pseudo-controversy that was ginned up about 50 years ago between so-called prescriptivists and descriptivists. According to this fairy tale there are prescriptivists who prescribe how language ought to be used and there are descriptivists, mainly academic linguists, who describe how language in fact is used. In this story there is a war between them, with prescriptivist dictionaries competing with descriptivist dictionaries.

Inevitably my own writing manual is going to be called "descriptivist," because it questions a number of dumb rules that are routinely flouted by all the best writers and had no business being in style books in the first place. These pseudo-rules violate the logic of English but get passed down as folklore from one style sheet to the next. But debunking stupid rules is not the same thing as denying the existence of rules, to say nothing of advice on writing. The Sense of Style is clearly prescriptive: it consists of 300 pages in which I boss the reader around.

This pseudo-controversy was created when Webster's Third International Dictionary was published in the early 1960s. Like all dictionaries, it paid attention to the way that language changes. If a dictionary didn't do that it would be useless: writers who consulted it would be guaranteed to be misunderstood. For example, there is an old prescriptive rule that says that "nauseous," which most people use to mean nauseated, cannot mean that. It must mean creating nausea, namely, "nauseating." You must write that a roller coaster ride was nauseous, or a violent movie was nauseous, not I got nauseous riding on the roller coaster or watching the movie. Nowadays, no one obeys this rule. If a dictionary were to stick by its guns and say it's an error to say that the movie made me nauseous, it would be a useless dictionary: it wouldn't be doing what a dictionary has to do. This has always been true of dictionaries.

But there's a myth that dictionaries work like the rulebook of Major League Baseball; they legislate what is correct. I can speak with some authority in saying that this is false. I am the Chair of the Usage Panel of The American Heritage Dictionary, which is allegedly the prescriptivist alternative to the descriptivist Webster's. But when I asked the editors how they decide what goes into the dictionary, they replied, "By paying attention to the way people use language."

Of course dictionary editors can't pay attention to the way everyone uses language, because people use language in different ways. When you write, you're writing for a virtual audience of well-read, literate fellow readers. And those are the people that we consult in deciding what goes into the dictionary, particularly in the usage notes that comment on controversies of usage, so that readers will know what to anticipate when they opt to obey or flout an alleged rule.

This entire approach is sometimes criticized by literary critics who are ignorant of the way that language works, and fantasize about a golden age in which dictionaries legislated usage. But language has always been a grassroots, bottom-up phenomenon. The controversy between "prescriptivists" and "descriptivists" is like the choice in "America: Love it or leave it" or "Nature versus Nurture"—a euphonious dichotomy that prevents you from thinking.

Many people get incensed about so-called errors of grammar which are perfectly unexceptionable. There was a controversy in the 1960s over the advertising slogan "Winston tastes good, like a cigarette should." The critics said it should be "as a cigarette should" and moaned about the decline of standards. . A more recent example was an SAT question that asked students whether there was an error in "Toni Morrison's genius allows her to write novels that capture the African American condition." Supposedly the sentence is ungrammatical: you can't have "Toni Morrison's" as an antecedent to the pronoun "she." Now that is a complete myth: there was nothing wrong with the sentence.

Once a rumor about a grammatical error gets legs, it can proliferate like an urban legend about alligators in the sewers. Critics and self-appointed guardians of the language will claim that language is deteriorating because people violate the rule—which was never a rule in the first place. It's so much fun to be in high dudgeon over the decline of language and civilization that these critics don't stop to check the rulebooks and dictionaries to discover how great writers write or to learn the logic of the English language.

Poets and novelists often have a better feel for the language than the self-appointed guardians and the pop grammarians because for them language is a medium. It's a way of conveying ideas and moods with sounds. The most gifted writers—the Virginia Woolfs and H.G. Wellses and George Bernard Shaws and Herman Melvilles—routinely used words and constructions that the guardians insist are incorrect. And of course avant-garde writers such as Burroughs and Kerouac, and poets pushing the envelope or expanding the expressive possibilities of the language, will deliberately flout even the genuine rules that most people obey. But even non-avant garde writers, writers in the traditional canon, write in ways that would be condemned as grammatical errors by many of the purists, sticklers and mavens.

Another bit of psychology that can make anyone a better writer is to be aware of a phenomenon sometimes called The Curse of Knowledge. It goes by many names, and many psychologists have rediscovered versions of it, including defective Theory of Mind, egocentrism, hindsight bias, and false consensus. They're all versions of an infirmity afflicting every member of our species, namely that it's hard to imagine what it's like not to know something that you do know.

It's easiest to see it in children. In one famous experiment, kid comes into a room, opens a box of candy, finds pencils inside, and the kid is surprised. Then you say to him, "Now Jason's going to come into the room. What does he think is in the box?" And the child will say "pencils." Of course, Jason has no way of knowing that the box had pencils, but the first child is projecting his own state of knowledge onto Jason, forgetting that other people may not know what he knows.

Now we laugh at the kids, but it's true of all of us. We as writers often use technical terms, abbreviations, assumptions about typical experimental methods, assumptions about what questions we ask in our research, that our readers have no way of knowing because they haven't been through the same training that we have. Overcoming the curse of knowledge may be the single most important requirement in becoming a clear writer.

Contrary to the common accusation that academic writing is bad because professors are trying to bamboozle their audience with highfalutin gobbledygook, I don't think that most bad prose is deliberate. I think it is inept. It is a failure to get inside the head of your reader. We also know from psychology that simply trying harder to get inside the head of your reader is not the ideal way to do it. No matter how hard we try, we're at best okay, but not great, at anticipating another person's state of knowledge.

Instead, you have to ask. You've got to show people a draft. Even if you're writing for laypeople, your reviewers don't all have to be laypeople; a colleague is better than no one. I'm often astonished at things that I think are obvious that turn out to be not so obvious to other people.

Another implication of the curse of knowledge is that having an editor is a really good thing. Supposedly there are writers who can dash off a perfectly comprehensible, clear, and coherent essay without getting feedback from a typical reader, but most of us don't have that clairvoyance. We need someone to say "I don't understand this" or "What the hell are you talking about?" To say nothing of attention to the fine points of punctuation, grammar, sentence structure, and other ways in which a sophisticated copy editor can add value to your written work.

How much of this advice comes from my experience as a writer and how much from my knowledge as a psycholinguist? Some of each. I often reflect on psychology behind the thousands of decisions I make as a writer in the lifelong effort to improve my prose, and I often think about how to apply experiments on sentence comprehension and the history of words and the logic (and illogic) of grammar to the task of writing. I might think, "Aha, the reason I rewrote this sentence that way is because of the memory demands of subject versus object relative clauses."

This combination of science and letters is emblematic of what I hope to be a the larger trend we spoke of earlier, namely the application of science, particularly psychology and cognitive science, to the traditional domains of humanities. There's no aspect of human communication and cultural creation that can't benefit from a greater application of psychology and the other sciences of mind. We would have an exciting addition to literary studies, for example, if literary critics knew more about linguistics.Poetry analysts could apply phonology (the study of sound structure) and the cognitive psychology of metaphor. An analysis of plot in fiction could benefit from a greater understanding of the conflicts and confluences of ultimate interests in human social relationships. The genre of biography would be deepened by an understanding of the nature of human memory, particularly autobiographical memory. How much of the memory of our childhood is confabulated? Memory scientists have a lot to say about that. How much do we polish our image of ourselves in describing ourselves to others, and more importantly, recollecting our own histories? Do we edit our memories in an Orwellian manner to make ourselves more coherent in retrospect? Syntax and semantics are relevant as well. How does a writer use the tense system of English to convey a sense of immediacy or historical distance?

In music the sciences of auditory and speech perception have much to contribute to understanding how musicians accomplish their effects. The visual arts could revive an old method of analysis going back to Ernst Gombrich and Rudolf Arnheim in collaboration with the psychologist Richard Gregory Indeed, even the art itself in the 1920s was influenced by psychology, thanks in part to Gertrude Stein, who as an undergraduate student of William James did a wonderful thesis on divided attention, and then went to Paris and brought the psychology of perception to the attention of artists like Picasso and Braque. Gestalt psychology may have influenced Paul Klee and the expressionists. Since then we have lost that wonderful synergy between the science of visual perception and the creation of visual art.

Going beyond the arts, the social sciences, such as political ,science could benefit from a greater understanding of human moral and social instincts, such as the psychology of dominance, the psychology of revenge and forgiveness, and the psychology of gratitude and social competition. All of them are relevant, for example, to international negotiations. We talk about one country being friendly to another or allying or competing, but countries themselves don't have feelings. It's the elites and leaders who do, and a lot of international politics is driven by the psychology of its leaders.

Even beyond applying the findings of psychology and cognitive science and social and affective neuroscience, it's the mindset of science that ought to be exported to cultural and intellectual life as a whole. That consists in increased skepticism and scrutiny about factual conventional wisdom: How much of what you think is true really is true if you go to the, the numbers? For me this has been a salient issue in analyzing violence, because the conventional wisdom is that we're living in extraordinarily violent times.

But if you take into account the psychology of risk perception, as pioneered by Daniel Kahneman, Amos Tversky, Paul Slovic, Gerd Gigerenzer, and others, you realize that the conventional wisdom is systematically distorted by the source of our information about the world, namely the news. News is about the stuff that happens; it's not about the stuff that doesn't happen. Human risk perception is affected by memorable examples, according to Tversky and Kahneman's availability heuristic. No matter what the rate of violence is objectively, there are always enough examples to fill the news. And since our perception of risk is influenced by memorable examples, we'll always think we're living in violent times. It's only when you apply the scientific mindset to world events, to political science and history, and try to count how many people are killed now as opposed to ten years ago, a hundred years ago, or a thousand years ago that you get an accurate picture about the state of the world and the direction that it's going, which is largely downward. That conclusion only came from applying an empirical mindset to the traditional subject matter of history and political science.

The other aspect of the scientific mindset that ought to be exported to the rest of intellectual life is the search for explanations. That is, not to just say that history is one damn thing after another, that stuff happens, and there's nothing we can do to explain why, but to relate phenomena to more basic or general phenomena … and to try to explain those phenomena with still more basic phenomena. We've repeatedly seen that happen in the sciences, where, for example, biological phenomena were explained in part at the level of molecules, which were explained by chemistry, which was explained by physics.

There's no reason that that this process of explanation can't continue. Biology gives us a grasp of the brain, and human nature is a product of the organization of the brain, and societies unfold as they do because they consist of brains interacting with other brains and negotiating arrangements to coordinate their behavior, and so on.

Now I know that there is tremendous resistance to this idea, because it's confused with a boogeyman called "reductionism"—the fear that we must explain World War I in terms of genes or even elementary particles.

But explanation does not imply reduction. You reduce the building blocks of an explanation to more complex phenomena one level down, but you don't discard the explanation of the phenomenon itself. So World War I obviously is not going to be explained in terms of neuroscience.On the other hand, World War I could be explained in terms of the emotions of fear and dominance and prestige among leaders, which fell into a deadly combination at that moment in history. And instead of just saying, "Well, that's the way things are, and there's nothing more we can say about it," we can ask, , "Why do people compete for prestige? Why do people have the kinds of fears that they do?

The answer doesn't have to be, "Because I said so" or "Because that's the way it is." You can ask, "How does the psychology of fear work? How does the psychology of dominance work? How does the psychology of coalitions work?" Having done that, you get a deeper understanding of some of the causes of World War I. That doesn't mean you throw out the conventional history of World War I, it just means that you enrich it, you diversity it, you deepen it. A program of unifying the arts and humanities with the psychological sciences and ultimately the biological sciences promises tremendous increases of depth of understanding for all the fields.

I'm often asked, "Who are the leaders of this movement? Whose writings should we be reading and discussing?" But that misses the point. It's not about individual people. It's more revolutionary than just reading this, that or the other person. There has to be a change in mindset coming from both directions. It's not just a question of getting traditional scholars from the humanities and social sciences to start incorporating more science, to start thinking more like scientists. It's got to work the other direction as well. A lot of scientists really are philistines when it comes to history and political theory and philosophy. We need to break down the idea that there are these separate disciplines and modes of study.

In trying to figure out what would give us the deepest, most insightful, most informative understanding of the world and ourselves, we have to be aware of the turf battles: who gets the franchise for talking about what matters. That is one reason that there is cadre of traditional intellectuals who have been hostile to science. I'm not talking about the climate deniers or the vaccine kooks but those who resent the idea that the discussion of what matters, of morality, of politics, of meaning, of purpose should be taken on by these philistines called scientists or social scientists. They act as if the franchise for these heavyweight topics has been given to critics and literary scholars and commentators on religion.

But we need not give credence to people who are simply protecting their turf. It's becoming increasingly clear over the decades and centuries that an understanding of science is central to our understanding of the deepest questions of who we are, where we came from, what matters. If you aren't aware of what science has to say about who we are and what we're like as a species, then you're going to be missing a lot of insight about human life. The fact that this upsets certain traditional bastions of commentary shouldn't matter. People always protect their turf.

That's why I'm reluctant to answer when I'm asked who are the people we should be reading, what names can we associate with this approach. It's not about people. It's about the ideas, and the ideas inevitably come piecemeal from many thinkers. The ideas are refined, exchanged, accumulated, and improved by a community of thinkers, each of whom will have some a few ideas and a lot of bad ideas. What we've been talking about is a direction that I hope the entire intellectual culture goes in. It's not about anointing some guru.

Another intellectual error we must be suspicious of is the ever-present tendency to demonize the younger generation and the direction in which culture and society are going. In every era there are commentators who say that the kids today are dumbing down the culture and taking human values with them. Today the accusations are often directed at anything having to do with the Web and other electronic technologies—as if the difference between being printed on dead trees and displayed as pixels on a screen is going to determine the content of ideas. We're always being told that young people suck: that they are illiterate and unreflective and un-thoughtful, all of which ignores the fact that every generation had that said about them by the older generation. Yet somehow civilization persists.

An appreciation of psychology can remind us that we as a species are prone to these bad habits. When we comment on the direction that intellectual life is going, we should learn to discount our own prejudices, our own natural inclination to say "I and my tribe are entitled to weigh in on profound issues, but members of some other guild or tribe or clique are not." And "My generation is the embodiment of wisdom and experience, and the younger generation is uncouth, illiterate, unwashed and uncivilized." better

There is no "conflict between the sciences and humanities," or at least there shouldn't be. There should be no turf battle as to who gets to speak about what matters. What matters are ideas. We should seek the ideas that give us the deepest, richest, best-informed understanding of the human condition, regardless of which people or what discipline originates them. That has to include the sciences, but it can't come only from the sciences. The focus should be on ideas, not on people, disciplines, or academic traditions.

ON KAHNEMAN: A Reality Club Discussion on the Work of Daniel Kahneman [3.27.14]

Wonderful tribute to a pioneer and original thinker. Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow, one of the best books I have read in recent years - forced me to change some of the things I thought to be true about the mind, and it confirmed things I had intuited to be true.

ON KAHNEMAN

A Reality Club Discussion on the Work of Daniel Kahneman [3.27.14]

Introduction By: John Brockman


 
HOW HAS KAHNEMAN'S WORK INFLUENCED YOUR OWN?
WHAT STEP DID IT MAKE POSSIBLE?

THE REALITY CLUB: Michael McCullough, June Gruber & Amy Cuddy, Xavier Gabaix & David Laibson, Gary Marcus, Christopher Chabris, Nicholas Epley, Jennifer Jacquet, Laurie Santos & Tamar Gendler, Jason Zweig, Mahzarin Banaji, Fiery Cushman, William Poundstone, Andrew Rosenfield, Cass Sunstein, Phil Rosenzweig, Richard Nisbett, Richard Thaler & Sendhil Mullainathan, Eric Kandel, Michael Norton, Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Joshua Greene, Walter Mischel, Steven Pinker, Nicholas Christakis, Rory Sutherland 

Introduction

Daniel Kahneman turned 80 on March 5th and Edge noted the occasion with a reprise of a number of his contributions to our pages. (See "Kahneman Turns 80").

At that time, Kahneman's longtime colleague, behavioural economist Richard Thaler, suggested that Edge follow up the birthday announcement by doing what it does best, asking Edgies who work in fields including, but not limited to, psychology, cognitive science, behavioral economics, law, medicine, a question.

For their responses to Thaler's question—"How has Kahneman's work influenced your own? What step did it make possible?"—we asked a selected group of Edgeis to include inspired leaps off of Kahneman's shoulders, not just applications of his ideas. We used a comment made by research psychologist Steven Pinker in the Q&A following Kahneman's talk at the 2011 Edge Master Class, as an example. Pinker said:

"If somebody were to ask me what are the most important contributions to human life from psychology, I would identify this work [by Kahneman & Tversky] as maybe number one, and certainly in the top two or three. In fact, I would identify the work on reasoning as one of the most important things that we've learned about anywhere. When we were trying to identify what any educated person should know in the entire expanse of knowledge, I argued unsuccessfully that the work on human cognition and probabilistic reason should be up there as one of the first things any educated person should know."

One way to consider the long and illustrious career of a great thinker such as Kahneman is not as a summation, but as a commission, one that gives us permission to move forward in certain ways. (Think Newton's "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.") As social psychologist Richard Nisbett noted, "It's not just a celebration of Danny. It's a celebration of behavioral science.".

—John Brockman

DANIEL KAHNEMAN is the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics, 2002 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, 2013. He is Eugene Higgins Professor of Psychology Emeritus, Princeton, and author of Thinking Fast and Slow.

Reality Club Discussion

Michael McCullough
Director, Evolution and Human Behavior Laboratory, Professor of Psychology, Cooper Fellow, University of Miami; Author, Beyond Revenge: The Evolution of the Forgiveness Instinct 

Rats Pay to Run; Humans Pay for Revenge

I got my introduction to Daniel Kahneman's ideas in the late 1980s while I was still an undergraduate. His name and his ideas just kept coming up, semester after semester, in course after course. Even a second- or third-year psychology student (assuming he or she had been paying adequate attention) could tell: This Kahneman person was a psychologist whose ideas mattered.

Some years later, I would turn to Kahneman's earlier research on the so-called Ultimatum Game for insights into the human appetite for revenge. In the Ultimatum Game, some amount of money, say $10, is to be divided between two players who are completely anonymous to each other. One player—the proposer—proposes a split, and the other player—the Responder—can either accept the proposal (and receive the portion of the $10 stake that that Proposer offered) or reject the proposal, in which case both players receive nothing.

Standard rational-actor models of economic behavior, of course, depict humans as income maximizers. This depiction leads one to expect Proposers to offer very small amounts to Responders, and to expect Responders to accept all non-zero offers. But that's not how Kahneman's experiment turned out. Instead, what Kahneman (along with his co-authors Jack Knetsch and Richard Thaler) found was that Proposers typically offered about $4.50 to their responders—a result that has since been replicated in scores of experiments. Proposers don't behave like rational actors should. They behave like creatures that are balancing a love of income with some other sort of concern.

That other concern, it seems, is the conviction that their Responders will rebuke them for unfair treatment—a concern that turns out to be a well-founded one. Kahneman and colleagues found that the typical Responder was willing to refuse offers that would net them less than $2.25 or so. Far from behaving like Homo economicus was expected to behave (which is to say, accepting any non-zero offer), Kahneman's Responders were willing to scuttle deals that revealed that their Proposers did not possess proper regard for their welfare. Responders' behavior is not merely governed by a love of money; it's also governed by a love of proper treatment from one's social partners.

A rat is a kind of animal that will pay for the opportunity to run on a wheel. A human is a kind of animal that will pay for the opportunity to revenge poor treatment at the hands of a stranger. Humans love respect, and humans love revenge, the way lab rats love to run. Any model of human behavior that ignores loves like these, Kahneman's results showed me, is a model that is going to fall short in profound ways.

_____

June Gruber Assistant Professor of Psychology, Yale University 

Amy J.C. Cuddy Associate Professor of Business Administration, Hellman Faculty Fellow, Harvard Business School

Daniel Kahneman is undoubtedly one of the most astounding minds in our field. His influence is equally vast and far-reaching as it is deep and sound. Yet his influence stretches beyond even science itself to cultivate two essential qualities in the humans behind the science: humility and receptiveness.

For humility, Einstein couldn't have said it better: "A true genius admits that he/she knows nothing." Kahneman's approach to science and interacting with others was one of great knowledge, yet emphasizing instead what he didn't know. Take his contributions to the study of happiness and well-being. As someone who pioneered our understanding of the nature of happiness—from what we mean by happiness, to overestimating the weight of factors such as geography that determine our happiness, to our two competing selves in searching for happiness—he once said that he "did not understand what happiness was." He emphasized how complex happiness was, how much we have yet to understand. Not once did he brag about his own work or insights, or make simplified sound-bite statements about happiness that often plague the field. Instead, he created a common ground where scientists could stand in the face of the unknown, and that happiness was one of these great unknowns sitting right in front of is. Part of his rich understanding of happiness and well-being is his noting what he didn't know and that we are very small in the vast space of knowing things.

For receptiveness, Kahneman is both an advocate for, and model of, civilized discourse in scientific debate. Cultivating respectful and productive approaches to resolving scientific disagreements is so important to him that he has named it as perhaps the most important legacy he hopes to leave. His work on adversarial collaboration offers one route through which scholars who disagree on a particular theoretical issue might attempt to resolve their dispute —by first identifying what they agree on, and then trying to "trade" the differences. But his contribution here goes far beyond the formal construct of adversarial collaboration. He continues to be guided by this principle, encouraging scholars who disagree about ideas to do so in a way that is respectful and productive. This is not an easy stance to take. In fact, psychological science shows us that it's actually quite difficult to be gracious and dignified when your ideas (or you) are being attacked. It's much easier to give in—to quickly fire back which serves neither the scholars nor the science. "You have to be willing to not win," he said. It sounds so simple—like advice we might give to our kids. But it is not easy, even for scientists with the best intentions, to live by that advice. Nonetheless, he does.

_____

Xavier Gabaix Martin J. Gruber Professor of Finance, New York University 

David Laibson Robert I. Goldman Professor of Economics, Harvard University

Danny Kahneman's work opened myriad doors for us. Most importantly, his work with Amos Tversky in the 1970's broke the conceptual monopoly of classical economic theory. By identifying and convincingly documenting robust empirical deviations from classical predictions, Danny and Amos created intellectual space for a new generation of young scholars who wanted to explore alternatives to the rational actor model. Danny made it respectable to question classical axioms. We've both taught almost every one of Danny's papers and read them each many times.

When Thinking Fast and Slow was published, we expected not to learn much that we hadn't learned already. We were wrong. His book is a master class, which speaks to students with every level of preparation. It inspired us to form a two-person reading group that met weekly for a year to discuss every page of the book. With Danny as our tour guide, we revisited many of the original papers with a synthetic perspective. His book has prompted a new research program for us as well. After all these years, Danny keeps surprising and inspiring us.

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Gary Marcus
Cognitive Scientist; Author, Guitar Zero: The New Musician and the Science of Learning

More than a hundred years into the modern history of psychology, I think it's fair to say that we are still a long way from fully understanding how the mind works. But it's also fair to say that nobody will come up with a compelling account of human cognition unless they wrestle seriously with Daniel Kahneman's pioneering work with Amos Tversky on heuristics and cognitive biases.

You would think that point would be obvious, but in my view, none of the currently fashionable theories of mind take Kahneman and Tversky's work seriously enough. Take, for instance, the popular notion that the mind might be a Bayesian engine of probabilistic cognition. According to one leading theorist, "over the past decade, many aspects of higher-level cognition have been illuminated by the mathematics of Bayesian statistics." Demonstration after demonstration purports to show that in certain narrowly-defined tasks, human psychology follows directly from the laws of probability. In this domain or that, people are said to make "optimal" or "near-optimal" decisions. People, for example, are very good at extrapolating how long someone might remain in the Senate, given that Senator X has already been there for a decade. But Bayesian zealots seem to forget just how lousy human beings are in other cases of extrapolation, as Kahneman and Tversky showed long ago, with their framing effect. (Take a dollar bill from your pocket, read the last three digits of the serial number, and then guess when Attila the Hun was born; most people will erroneously extrapolate from this bit of wholly irrelevant information.) In a recent review, I suggested that every alleged Bayesian success could be juxtaposed with an equally compelling cognitive error, most of which were first documented by Kahneman and Tversky. Every time I read the Bayesian literature, I wince, and think of a different cognitive error: confirmation bias. It's easy to find evidence for any old theory; good science requires considering evidence that might potentially go against one's theory. In my humble opinion, anyone who tries to understand the mind without taking seriously Kahneman's oeuvre is doomed to failure.

In my own work, I have thought deeply about what Kahneman's work might mean for evolutionary psychology. The default assumption of evolutionary psychology is one of optimality: give evolution enough time, and eventually it will alight on a beautiful, elegant solution, like the retina, sensitive to a single photon of light. The reality of evolution is that it is a blind process, with no guarantee of alighting on optimality. Too much of evolutionary psychology, in my view, dwells on systems in which the mind is apparently optimal; the real challenge ought to be in understanding how those apparently-optimal systems live alongside other systems that sometimes confoundingly seem to do the wrong thing; until evolutionary psychology can explain anchoring, availability, and future discounting, as well as it can explain mate selection and reciprocal altruism; it will be only half a science. The ultimate goal of human psychology must be to characterize both what we do well, and what we do poorly, and how we balance the two. Kahneman and Tversky's work is, without question, the best place to start.

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Christopher Chabris
Associate Professor of Psychology, Union College; Co-author, The Invisible Gorilla, and Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us. 

There's an overarching lesson I have learned from the work of Danny Kahneman, Amos Tversky, and their colleagues who collectively pioneered the modern study of judgment and decision-making: Don't trust your intuition. It's such an important lesson that it wound up in the subtitle of my book. So I am wary of consulting my intuition to try to discern a pattern of influence that may only be visible through the distorting lens of hindsight. Instead, I'll talk about the value of Kahneman's approach to behavioral research.

As I see it, the Kahneman formula for high-impact social science combines three elements:

1. Systematic human error: Kahneman and Tversky are known for discovering situations where many or most people give answers that are inconsistent with some normative theory of what is correct. Usually this theory is based on logic or basic probability or arithmetic. But those errors aren't random—they are systematic errors, also known as biases. It's easy to forget how revolutionary this approach once was. Much research in cognitive psychology compares the rate of error in different conditions, but it doesn't look at the content of those errors. Looking at the frequency of mistakes across different conditions is a perfectly valid and useful research strategy, but looking at systematic error is more powerful. For one thing, when a normative theory makes a strong prediction—that a certain answer is simply wrong and should never occur—then it is easier to find large effects. (The t-test against a theoretical value is a high-power statistical procedure.)

2. Large effects: There's nothing wrong with looking for small effects, and small effects can have great theoretical meaning. But they are harder to find, and they tend to be of less practical importance. As much as possible we should work on large effects that can be easily replicated, since those will provide a firm empirical foundation for future work. If some researchers can obtain effects that others can't, progress will be difficult. Kahneman's work shows us that there are many large effects out there to be found and understood.

3. Simple experiments: The simpler an experiment is to conduct, the more likely it is that multiple independent researchers will be able to replicate it, extend it, and exchange information about it. Kahneman's most influential studies consisted of asking research subjects just one easily-understood question, and the methodology was the simple randomized experiment.

Combining these three elements isn't the only way to do good behavioral research, by any means. And of course it doesn't automatically work. It can be dangerously seductive if it leads us to pursue what is surprising or newsworthy over what is important and true. But it has the potential to point toward deeply nonobvious facts that have large consequences. Kahneman and his colleagues discovered lots of those, including the conjunction fallacy, the neglect of base rates, the excessive pain of losses as compared to the pleasure of gains, the difference in how we value things we own and things we don't, and the surprising happiness of people who have suffered greatly. We can and should discuss whether these are all really errors (as opposed to behaviors that have or had adaptive value) and we should work on discovering the mechanisms that lie beneath them. Those pursuits are likely to bear fruit precisely because they are starting from the firm foundation Kahneman's approach established.

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Nicholas Epley Professor of Behavioral Science, University of Chicago, Booth School of Business

Essential Ingredients

Kahneman's influence was to provide the essential ingredients for all of my work: a problem, and possible solutions. The problem was that people's beliefs, judgments, and choices are routinely "wrong." They may wrong because they disagree with a statistical principle, a rational principle, reality, or some combination of all three. The solution is that people beliefs, judgments, and choices are not guided simply by statistics, rationality, or reality, but instead are guided by generally intelligent, but imperfect, psychological processes that take hard problems and convert them to easy problems that normal human beings can solve. If you understand these processes that guide intuitive judgment, then you can understand why perception and reality diverge.

By extending Kahneman's problem as well as his ideas about its solution, I have built a career trying to understand how otherwise brilliant human beings can be so routinely "wrong" in their beliefs and judgments about each other. Why do people overestimate how often others agree with them? Why are people sometimes less accurate predicting their own future behavior than predicting others' behavior? Why do people overestimate how harshly they will be judged for an embarrassing blunder? Why do liberals think conservatives have more extreme views than conservatives actually do? The list of such cases where our social thinking goes wrong is long, but it is Kahneman's influence that runs through its entire length.

Asking how Kahneman's work has influenced my own is a bit like asking a doctor how oxygen influences life. My work wouldn't exist without him.

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Jennifer Jacquet
Clinical Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies, NYU; Researching cooperation and the tragedy of the commons 

When I was a 20-year-old undergraduate majoring in economics I heard Jack Knetsch, a longtime Kahneman collaborator, speak about the endowment effect. The talk was a revelation and introduced me to the experimental side of decision-making, where I then found work by Daniel Kahneman and others, who had been studying decision-making for decades. As professors were trying to convince me of behavior based on laws of supply and demand, the insights of Kahneman, Tversky, Knetsch, Thaler and others showed that the conventional economic models were deeply flawed.

After what I see as years of hard work, experiments of admirable design, lucid writing, and quiet leadership, Kahneman, a man who spent the majority of his career in departments of psychology, earned the highest prize in economics. This was a reminder that some of the best insights into economic behavior could be (and had been) gleaned outside of the discipline. Aside from amassing such a huge and influential body of work, Kahneman's revolutionary advances in economic decision-making granted everyone permission to take scholars outside the field of economics seriously and reminded us that humans who think both fast and slow, not mathematical models built on ideologies, are the bedrock of behavior.

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Laurie R. Santos
Associate Professor of Psychology, Director, Comparative Cognition Laboratory, Yale University 

Tamar Gendler
Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science, and Chair, Department of Philosophy; Deputy Provost for Humanities and Initiatives, Yale University

Ralph Waldo Emerson once noted that "in every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts: they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."

We've all at some point had the thought "I'm feeling pulled in two directions." For example, we all know what it feels like to desire some immediate gratification while recognizing that it would be better in the long run to resist. Thoughts like these are noticed even early in life: very young children also notice the conflict between different "sides" of themselves. But our thoughts about this conflict are often left inchoate, or even rejected.

It took somebody with Danny Kahneman's genius to live up to Emerson's challenge: to give these kinds of thoughts their appropriate majesty.

What Danny showed the world is that our conflicting cognitive moments fit into a pattern: they are all the result of a fundamental feature of our cognitive architecture, namely, that our minds are dualistic. Danny's ingenious studies gave us insight into the processes that make us more than just our System IIs. While he wasn't the first to notice that the fast systems existed, he was the first to give us tools that could tap into the mechanisms that underlie our automatic heuristics.

And what Danny showed the world, he has also taught to the two of us as scholars. Even though we work on superficially different topics (the evolutionary origins of cognitive biases in other primates and the philosophical roots of the relation between rational and arational processing—respectively) in two different departments (Psychology and Philosophy), Danny's influence on both of our research programs has been profound. His work has defined the space in which our questions emerge.

But Danny's work has also left both our research programs with a new challenge. Novices who hear about Danny's findings for the first time sometimes get the wrong message about thinking fast or slow—they want to choose one or the other. But this misses the important point. Danny's work teaches us that we don't need to make that choice: An effective mind is one that doesn't fall prey to the easy answers it gets from System I when they mislead, but leaves the fast heuristics in charge when they're best suited to steer us in the right direction. We now know that our goal shouldn't be to get rid of one system or the other, but to get them both into an appropriate balance.

The problem is how to do this—what is the right balance and how do we achieve it? There's still a lot to learn, both in terms of mechanisms and in terms of applications. Answering this new question is the task of the generation that Danny has inspired.

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Jason Zweig
Journalist; Personal Finance Columnist, The Wall Street Journal; Author, Your Money and Your Brain

While I worked with Danny on a project, many things amazed me about this man whom I had believed I already knew well: his inexhaustible mental energy, his complete comfort in saying "I don't know," his ability to wield a softly spoken "Why?" like the swipe of a giant halberd that could cleave overconfidence with a single blow.

But nothing amazed me more about Danny than his ability to detonate what we had just done.

Anyone who has ever collaborated with him tells a version of this story: You go to sleep feeling that Danny and you had done important and incontestably good work that day. You wake up at a normal human hour, grab breakfast, and open your email. To your consternation, you see a string of emails from Danny, beginning around 2:30 a.m. The subject lines commence in worry, turn darker, and end around 5 a.m. expressing complete doubt about the previous day's work.

You send an email asking when he can talk; you assume Danny must be asleep after staying up all night trashing the chapter. Your cellphone rings a few seconds later. "I think I figured out the problem," says Danny, sounding remarkably chipper. "What do you think of this approach instead?"

The next thing you know, he sends a version so utterly transformed that it is unrecognizable: It begins differently, it ends differently, it incorporates anecdotes and evidence you never would have thought of, it draws on research that you've never heard of. If the earlier version was close to gold, this one is hewn out of something like diamond: The raw materials have all changed, but the same ideas are somehow illuminated with a sharper shift of brilliance.

The first time this happened, I was thunderstruck. How did he do that? How could anybody do that? When I asked Danny how he could start again as if we had never written an earlier draft, he said the words I've never forgotten: "I have no sunk costs."

To most people, rewriting is an act of cosmetology: You nip, you tuck, you slather on lipstick. To Danny, rewriting is an act of war: If something needs to be rewritten then it needs to be destroyed. The enemy in that war is yourself.

After decades of trying, I still hadn't learned how to be a writer until I worked with Danny.

I no longer try to fix what I've just written if it doesn't work. I try to destroy it instead— and start all over as if I had never written a word.

Danny taught me that you can never create something worth reading unless you are committed to the total destruction of everything that isn't. He taught me to have no sunk costs.

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Mahzarin Banaji
Psychologist; Richard Clarke Cabot Professor of Social Ethics, Department of Psychology, Harvard University; Co-author, Blind Spot: Hidden Biases of Good People
I first encountered Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky's work in a psychology course I took in India. I can't say that I had the sophistication to appreciate it or the foresight to recognize its importance until later when I read the work of Herbert Simon and Allen Newell in the early 1980s, and spotted the deep level similarity—in spite of the difference in orientations.

I was fortunate to be surrounded by people who always saw the wonder of Kahneman and Tversky's work, so I don't recall having to defend it against criticisms. The bounds on rationality that some K&T heuristics created, when applied to decisions about groups of people, may be called stereotypes or intergroup attitudes. The bounds on rationality shown by Kahneman seemed akin to me to the bounds on rationality placed on our thinking by the social categories to which we belong, at the most simple level, the categories of "us" and "them". And so when I began to think about particular errors in social cognition, for example those that create automatic association of "good" and "bad" with racial or ethnic groups (in the absence of similar sentiments in conscious self report), it seemed to me that the path along which I was to proceed was going to be easy, having been cleared by Danny and Amos among others. All we were doing is showing the bounds on thinking that had some moral or ethical aspects.

It seemed rather obvious that the rules of thumb that described thinking in general encompassed the social world as well. And the evidence did show that reliance on gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, age, nationality, religion, and dozens of other categories into which humans are placed could produce similar corruptions in computation and decision-making as K&T had shown about thinking in general.

So it was a surprise when we first reported some results to encounter resistance to the idea that automatic stereotypes existed or that they were ordinary enough to characterize all human minds (including those of the scientists who studied them). In these moments, Danny's work could always be relied upon as a model for discovery; that the task was to discover the nature of human minds, irrespective of whether the results painted an appealing view of ourselves or not. Why it is that the legitimacy of some errors and heuristics is fully accepted, but particular social instantiations of the same is resisted has always been of some mild interest to me.

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Fiery Cushman
Assistant Professor, Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences, Brown University

I appreciated Kahneman's accomplishments for a long time in the strict cognitive sense in which I once knew that the Vatican is in Rome and they've got some awfully good art there. But it was only quite recently that I was made to really feel the full scope of his accomplishments; to be gobsmacked in the way it felt to first see that Italian art from below. And it happened at an Edge event*, of all places.

Several younger social scientists were brought together and asked to discuss whatever they considered to be the most exciting new developments in their field. The first speaker talked about "big data", but the specific case study at the heart of his talk involved a reanalysis of loss aversion. Kahneman joined the event as a discussant, and of course we were all keen to hear his perspective. The second speaker talked about the science of happiness; again, everyone glanced at Kahneman to gauge his reaction. The third speaker described some recent work hinting at the neural basis of dual process models. All eyes on Kahneman.

So here you had three young scientists selected more or less at random, each asked to talk about the thing that most excited them. Each chose a completely different topic. And Daniel Kahneman was not just foremost expert in the room on each of these topics, he was arguably the foremost expert in the world.

It is reasonable to wonder whether this is truly a credit to Kahneman, or instead an indictment of the imagination of a younger generation. This would be a fair critique if each the talks had simply reshuffled the basic ideas that Kahenman (and others of equal brilliance and foresight) had articulated many years ago. Fortunately, just the opposite was true: Each of the talks proposed challenges, corrections, and extensions of Kahneman's work.

How has that body work enabled my own? There is a saying that when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. Psychologists have wielded hammers of every sort to model human reasoning—cognitivism, associationism, connectionism, analogy, logic, metaphor, heuristics, and so forth. What Kahneman made possible—in fact, inescapable—is the realization that mind is made of at least two kinds of things (nails and screws, perhaps?) and that they demand the application of very different tools. Because my own work is largely occupied with the problem of finding the right model for the mind's hardware, it is made immeasurably easier by knowing that there are at least two things I'm looking for.

In other words, to me, the most exciting thing happening in the social sciences right now is that we're finding ways to answer the questions that Kahneman's work defined .
 

* See Headcon '13: What's New In Social Science

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William Poundstone
Journalist; Author, Are Your Smart Enough To Work At Google?; Nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize

As a writer of nonfiction I'm often in the position of trying to connect the dots—to draw grand conclusions from small samples. Do three events make a trend? Do three quoted sources justify a conclusion? Both are maxims of journalism. I try to keep in mind Kahneman and Tversky's Law of Small Numbers. It warns that small samples aren't nearly so informative, in our uncertain world, as intuition counsels. I have from time to time changed the wording of a passage with this in mind. If sources A, B, and C say that binge-viewing is changing the nature of television, it's fine to quote them, assuming the quotes are interesting, but there is little point in the writer repeating the claim as a "fact." For one thing, the reader will be all too quick to jump to that conclusion, without any pushing by the writer. For another, the community of experts may not be so unanimous as the sample (and/or the experts may be wrong).

The next edition of Strunk and White ought to have a Kahneman and Tversky rule: The writer should (usually) avoid supplying conclusions drawn from small samples.

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Andrew M. Rosenfield
Senior Lecturer in Law, U. Chicago Law School; Managing Partner, The Greatest Good (TGG). 

I was educated at Chicago in the 1970s and never left. As Kahneman's work began to come to my attention in those days, it was not (then) received with great enthusiasm among most of my colleagues. How odd that seems to me now when it is universally admired everywhere, without qualification.

I met Danny quite late in his career—in the early 2000's, at a conference. That is the only conference that ever changed my life, and change my life it surely did.

His ideas seemed both completely clear, compelling and remarkably powerful. The only thing in my experience to which I can compare learning behavioral science from Danny is learning the mathematics of differential equations. As you start to understand differential equations, they first seem impossible, then magical and finally when you "get it" you see them as beautiful and remarkably general tools.

The broad and enduring value of the revolution Danny led, like all great new scientific thinking, will, of course, be greatest in application outside the academy.

We got to know one another and ended up in business together where for the last ten or so years we have helped to prove the efficacy of his work in many applications where doubters would have said (indeed did say) it would have no application. He proved them wrong.

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Cass R. Sunstein
Legal Scholar; Robert Walmsley University Professor, Harvard; Fmr, Administrator of White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs; Author, Why Nudge?
Danny Kahneman is responsible for so many ideas that one needs a heuristic to select among them. I am choosing the Coauthorship Heuristic.

From about 1996 until about 2007, I was privileged to work with Kahneman (and David Schkade) on a series of papers on punitive damage awards. Here are four ideas for which Kahneman is above all responsible. These ideas are hardly Kahneman’s most well-known, but they are full of implications, and we have only started to understand them.

1. The outrage heuristic. People’s judgments about punishment are a product of outrage, which operates as a shorthand for more complex inquiries that judges and lawyers often think relevant. When people decide about appropriate punishment, they tend to ask a simple question: How outrageous was the underlying conduct? It follows that people are intuitive retributivists, and also that utilitarian thinking will often seem uncongenial and even outrageous.

2. Scaling without a modulus. Remarkably, it turns out that people often agree on how outrageous certain misconduct is (on a scale of 1 to 8), but also remarkably, their monetary judgments are all over the map. The reason is that people do not have a good sense of how to translate their judgments of outrage onto the monetary scale. As Kahneman shows, some work in psychophysics explains the problem: People are asked to “scale without a modulus,” and that is an exceedingly challenging task. The result is uncertainty and unpredictability. These claims have implications for numerous questions in law and policy, including the award of damages for pain and suffering, administrative penalties, and criminal sentences.

3. Rhetorical asymmetry. In our work on jury awards, we found that deliberating juries typically produce monetary awards against corporate defendants that are higher, and indeed much higher, than the median award of the individual jurors before deliberation began. Kahneman’s hypothesis is that in at least a certain category of cases, those who argue for higher awards have a rhetoric advantage over those who argue for lower awards, leading to a rhetorical asymmetry. The basic idea is that in light of social norms, one side, in certain debates, has an inherent advantage – and group judgments will shift accordingly. A similar rhetorical asymmetry can be found in groups of many kinds, in both private and public sectors, and it helps to explain why groups move.

4. Predictably incoherent judgments. We found that when people make moral or legal judgments in isolation, they produce a pattern of outcomes that they would themselves reject, if only they could see that pattern as a whole. A major reason is that human thinking is category-bound. When people see a case in isolation, they spontaneously compare it to other cases that are mainly drawn from the same category of harms. When people are required to compare cases that involve different kinds of harms, judgments that appear sensible when the problems are considered separately often appear incoherent and arbitrary in the broader context. In my view, Kahneman’s idea of predictable coherence has yet to be adequately appreciated; it bears on both fiscal policy and on regulation.

We should be able to see the close connection between these findings and many themes in Kahneman’s work, and indeed the distinction between System 1 and System 2 helps to illuminate all of them. That distinction, and Kahneman’s findings about how risk-related intuitions can go wrong, very much influenced my work in the Obama Administration, where I was privileged to serve as the Administrator of the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs. It is clear that in an increasing number of nations, public policy is a lot better than it would be because of Kahneman’s research. Both System 1 and System 2 concur: The influence of that research will grow significantly in the future.

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Phil Rosenzweig
Professor of Strategy and International Business at IMD, Lausanne, Switzerland

For those of who studied economics at university, as I did in the 1970s, the work of Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky came as a most welcome corrective. My first encounter with their work on heuristics and biases, while a doctoral student in the 1980s, was a transformational experience, a moment when the pieces of a larger puzzle are re-arranged and the world never looks quite the same again. The elegance of their experiments, honed and sharpened to capture precisely the phenomenon of interest, was such that even the field they challenged—economics—had to acknowledge the power of their findings. It's a rare duo that can so fundamentally call into question the received wisdom of a field and manage to get the results published in one of its leading journals, as was the case with their 1979 classic published in Econometrica, "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk."

Even so, the application of many insights about judgment and choice, so neatly distilled in laboratory settings, has been neither a smooth nor straight road. The reason has less to do with shortcoming of the cognitive psychologists and decision theorists who conducted the studies, and more to do with the way others sought to generalize the findings without careful regard to the nature of real world decisions, which often involve circumstances that can be very different. Much of my research has been about precisely this: understanding the messy world of managerial decision making. For that, the research of Danny Kahneman has been an essential and firm foundation.

For years, there were (as the old saying has it) two kinds of people: those relatively few of us who were aware of the work of Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and the much more numerous who were not. Happily, the balance is now shifting, and more of the general public has been able to hear directly a voice that is in equal measures wise and modest.
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Richard Nisbett
Professor of Psychology, University of Michigan; Author, Intelligence and How We Get It

Only people of a certain age will recall that when Danny and Amos began their work on heuristics, every social and behavioral scientist knew that their job was strictly empirical: you report only what people do and think. It was absolutely forbidden to be prescriptive—to say what people ought to do or think.

In light of this training, many people were outraged that Danny and Amos were making normative assertions about the way people should reason.

It's hard for most behavioral scientists to believe today that anyone, let alone a philosopher at a prominent institution, could have written in response to Danny's work that

"Ordinary human reasoning—by which I mean the reasoning of adults who have not been systematically educated in any branch of logic or probability theory—cannot be held to be faultily programmed: it sets its own standards."

This same philosopher—and many other philosophers and behavioral scientists as well—went on to try to show how Danny's reasoning about the problems he gave his subjects was wrong, and the reasoning of ordinary people was correct.

There are two main problems with this position.

1) There is no such thing as ordinary untutored human reasoning: there is an enormous range of approaches to problems like the ones Danny presented to people. And that's just among people in developed countries who have had no special training. When you look at people in other cultures the range gets broader still.

2) When you teach "ordinary" people rules like regression, the law of large numbers, and avoidance of the conjunction fallacy—either in classrooms or in laboratory settings—they don't give you static. They accept correction and try to reason in line with those rules. Danny's critics were placed in the position of a lawyer defending a client who had already thrown himself on the mercy of the court!

Early on in the debate, an article in Behavioral and Brain Science critiquing Danny's work was sent out to people who might reply to it. Surprisingly, almost no behavioral scientists took the side of the critics. And that was largely the end of it, except for a very few psychologists who continued the critique, often with a moralistic tone, and some psychologists who were ignorant of the details of the debate. Astonishingly, I've been told by a prominent philosopher that most philosophers still believe that "ordinary human reasoning" is without blemish and can't be criticized.

By far the greatest influence on my work was that of Amos and Danny. The research continues to guide my research and thinking.

I once saw a letter Danny wrote to an institution that was considering hiring one of the psychologists critical of his work. He wrote something to the effect that he expected to end up in the ashcan of intellectual history, but not at the hands of that particular psychologist. Danny was right about the latter, but not about the former. Intellectual history has been permanently deflected by his work.

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Richard H. Thaler
Father of Behavioral Economics; Director, Center for Decision Research, University of Chicago Graduate School of Business; Co-Author, Nudge
  

Sendhil Mullainathan
Professor of Economics, Harvard; Assistant Director for Research, The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), U.S. Treasury Department (2011-2013); Coauthor, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much

Kahneman and Tversky made Behavioral Economics Adjacently Possible

Even in science, timing is everything. Charles Babbage' programmable computer was, in 1837, a step—or two—too early. Influential ideas are those that are novel but just familiar enough that existing researchers can build on them. Stuart Kauffman coined the term "adjacent possible" to describe the untapped potential that sits only one step away where scientists currently sit. Scientists who open the adjacent possible deserve the research equivalent of an "assist" in sports.

The earliest work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, the famous "heuristics and biases program" merits many such assists, for opening up an important adjacent possible for economics: it made possible behavioral economics. We, like so many others, flowed into this territory and both owe our careers to the creation of that possibility.

Kahneman and Tversky's early work opened this door exactly because it was not what most people think it was. Many think of this work as an attack on rationality (often defined in some narrow technical sense). That misconception still exists among many, and it misses the entire point of their exercise. Attacks on rationality had been around well before Kahneman and Tversky—many people recognized that the simplifying assumptions of economics were grossly over-simplifying. Of course humans do not have infinite cognitive abilities. We are also not as strong as gorillas, as fast as cheetahs, and cannot swim like sea lions. But we do not therefore say that there is something wrong with humans. That we have limited cognitive abilities is both true and no more helpful to doing good social science that to acknowledge our weakness as swimmers. Pointing it out did it open any new doors.

Kahneman and Tversky's work did not just attack rationality, it offered a constructive alternative: a better description of how humans think. People, they argued, often use simple rules of thumb to make judgments, which incidentally is a pretty smart thing to do. But this is not the insight that left us one step from doing behavioral economics. The breakthrough idea was that these rules of thumb could be catalogued. And once understood they can be used to predict where people will make systematic errors. Those two words are what made behavioral economics possible.

Consider their famous representativeness heuristic, the tendency to judge probabilities by similarity. Use of this heuristic can lead people to make forecasts that are too extreme, often based on sample sizes that are too small to offer reliable predictions. As a result, we can expect forecasters to be predictably surprised when they draw on small samples. When they are very optimistic, the outcomes will tend to be worse than they thought, and unduly pessimistic forecasts will lead to pleasant but unexpected surprises. To the great surprise to economists who had put great faith in the efficiency of markets, this simple idea led to the discovery of large mispricing in domains that vary from stock markets to the selection of players in the National Football League.

Behavioral economists have now made important contributions to many domains of economics, and have utilized the findings of numerous other social scientists along the way. But none of this would have happened if Amos and Danny had not opened up the adjacent possible, by telling us about systematic biases.

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Eric R. Kandel
Recipient, Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 2002; Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Columbia University; Author, The Age of Insight; In Search of Memory

Daniel Kahneman has not yet influenced my work on snails and mice, but I am only in an early point in my career and I still look forward to exploring his ideas in a molecular biological context in the future.

That said, he has influenced my life. His friendship, advice and thoughtfulness have enriched me significantly and I look forward to many more productive interactions. _____ 

Michael I. Norton
Associate Professor of Marketing, Harvard Business School; coauthor, Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending.
Danny Kahneman sets a nearly impossible standard for social scientists: design experiments that so perfectly (and subtly) capture two different versions of the world that you don't even need to see the results to have already learned something novel.

A change of a single word or a single number—think of "400 people will die" versus "200 people will be saved"—and readers are instantly in the shoes of people experiencing those two different versions, and immediately see how they would behave differently in those two worlds.

This ability to create two seemingly similar worlds that lead to such different behavior leads to a broader learning, a kind of counterfactual approach to the world: "Wait, if a few words can alter my own behavior, how much of what I think and do is influenced by other trivial factors? My mood? My level of sleep? What I ate for breakfast?"

In a research world in which complexity of design and analysis serves as a proxy for importance, his approach reminds us—both scientists and laypeople—that the most profound insight often derives from the most elegant design.

_____

Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering, New York University School of Engineering ; Author, Incerto (Antifragile, The Black Swan...)
The Problem of Multiple Counterfactuals

Here is an insight Danny K. triggered and changed the course of my work. I figured out a nontrivial problem in randomness and its underestimation a decade ago while reading the following sentence in a paper by Kahneman and Miller of 1986:

A spectator at a weight lifting event, for example, will find it easier to imagine the same athlete lifting a different weight than to keep the achievement constant and vary the athlete's physique.

This idea of varying one side, not the other also applies to mental simulations of future (random) events, when people engage in projections of different counterfactuals (we treat alternative past and future histories in exactly the same analytical manner).

It hit me that the mathematical consequence is vastly more severe than it appears. Kahneman and colleagues focused on the bias that variable of choice is not random. But the paper set off in my mind the following realization: now what if we were to go one step beyond and perturbate both? The response would be nonlinear. I had never considered the effect of such nonlinearity earlier nor seen it explicitly made in the literature on risk and counterfactuals. And you never encounter one single random variable in real life; there are many things moving together.

Increasing the number of random variables compounds the number of counterfactuals and causes more extremes—particularly in fat-tailed environments (i.e., Extremistan): imagine perturbating by producing a lot of scenarios and, in one of the scenarios, increasing the weights of the barbell and decreasing the bodyweight of the weightlifter. This compounding would produce an extreme event of sorts. Extreme, or tail events (Black Swans) are therefore more likely to be produced when both variables are random, that is real life. Simple.

Now, in the real world we never face one variable without something else with it. In academic experiments, we do. This sets the serious difference between laboratory (or the casino's "ludic" setup), and the difference between academia and real life. And such difference is, sort of, tractable.

I rushed to change a section for the 2003 printing of one of my books. Say you are the manager of a fertilizer plant. You try to issue various projections of the sales of your product—like the weights in the weightlifter's story. But you also need to keep in mind that there is a second variable to perturbate: what happens to the competition—you do not want them to be lucky, invent better products, or cheaper technologies. So not only you need to predict your fate (with errors) but also that of the competition (also with errors). And the variance from these errors add arithmetically when one focuses on differences. There was a serious error made by financial analysts. When comparing strategy A and strategy B, people in finance compare the Sharpe ratio (that is, the mean divided by the standard deviation of a stream of returns) of A to the Sharpe ratio of B and look at the difference between the two. It is very different than the correct method of looking at the Sharpe ratio of the difference, A-B, which requires a full distribution.

Now, the bad news: the misunderstanding of the problem is general. Because scientists (not just financial analysts) use statistical methods blindly and mechanistically, like cooking recipes, they tend to make the mistake when consciously comparing two variables. About a decade after I exposed the Sharpe ratio problem, Nieuwenhuis et al. in 2011 found that 50% of neuroscience papers (peer-reviewed in "prestigious journals") that compared variables got it wrong, using the single variable methodology.

In theory, a comparison of two experimental effects requires a statistical test on their difference. In practice, this comparison is often based on an incorrect procedure involving two separate tests in which researchers conclude that effects differ when one effect is significant (P < 0.05) but the other is not (P > 0.05). We reviewed 513 behavioral, systems and cognitive neuroscience articles in five top-ranking journals (Science, Nature, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron and The Journal of Neuroscience) and found that 78 used the correct procedure and 79 used the incorrect procedure. An additional analysis suggests that incorrect analyses of interactions are even more common in cellular and molecular neuroscience.

Sadly, ten years after I reported the problem to investment professionals; the mistake is still being made. Ten years from now, they will still be making the same mistake.

Now that was the mild problem. There is worse. We were discussing two variables. Now assume the entire environment is random, and you will see that standard analyses of future events are doomed to underestimate tails. In risk studies, a severe blindness to multivariate tails prevails. The discussions on the systemic risks of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) by "experts" falls for such butchering of risk management, invoking some biological mechanism and missing on the properties of the joint distribution of tails.

_____

Joshua D. Greene
Cognitive Neuroscientist and Philosopher, Harvard University
It's hard to overstate Kahneman's influence on my work. What I have done, essentially, is to look at moral thinking through the lenses ground by Daniel Kahneman. In my first year of college I was introduced to the field of "heuristics and biases" and was struck by the power of these ideas—that some of the most important decisions we make are deeply myopic. Soon after, I was introduced to contemporary debates in ethics, much of which center around moral dilemmas such as the Trolley Problem. These dilemmas boil the great debate in modern moral philosophy—Kant vs. Mill—down to its essentials, eliciting strong judgments favoring both sides. I felt that if I could understand the thinking behind those judgments I could understand a lot. Looking at these problems through my new Kahnemanian lens, I saw modern moral debate as a battle between morality "fast and slow," both in the brain and out in the world. I've been chasing down the implications of that idea ever since.

_____

Walter Mischel
Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters, Department of Psychology, Columbia University; Author, The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control

"Answering an Easier Question"

I have known Danny Kahneman for more than 40 years, and am taking the liberty of bypassing the editorial instructions to avoid the personal and will mention how we first met. From my brief time as chair of the Stanford Psychology Department in the 1970s I recall two achievements: a new paint job and hiring Amos Tversky. Amos in turn brought Danny often into the Tversky's campus home. Some of my most treasured memories of that time were watching them thinking, talking, and laughing when they were at the height of their collaboration. Since then, I have avidly absorbed Danny's work, and enjoyed every conversation we have had. It has all influenced my own thinking, not only about our science, but about how to try to do it right.

My second violation of Edge's request to stick to ideas, not books, is to note that an extraordinary moment is occurring that is good news not just for Danny but for our science: Danny's serious book about how we think is being celebrated in London on the sale of its one millionth's copy in the UK alone. So, benefiting from his Thinking Fast and Slow, specifically Chapter 9, "Answering an Easier Question", I will use my space here not to address the question Edge asked, but to ask instead: How did he do it? Not just the book, but all of it.

Kahneman himself gives us some good hints in a short 2007 autobiography buried in volume IX of A History of Psychology in Autobiography in an APA series that may have more authors than readers. He tells us that he has consistently tried to use an approach he calls the "psychology of single questions" which he contrasts with the typical approach in psychological science in which "concepts are commonly associated with procedures that can be described only by long lists or by convoluted paragraphs of prose."

In one wonderful year he and Amos focused completely on the 1974 Science article that catapulted them into the history books. Danny attributes its remarkable impact (that ultimately also led to the Nobel Prize), to the medium as much as to the message. He notes that in the 1974 article he and Amos continued to practice the psychology of single questions. He believes that citing those questions verbatim in the text of the article: "personally engaged readers and convinced them that we were concerned not with the stupidity of Joe Public but with a much more interesting issue: the susceptibility to erroneous intuitions of intelligent, sophisticated, and perceptive individuals such as themselves." Forty years later the same voice and practice surely underlie the success of Thinking Fast and Slow.

Reflecting further on his collaboration with Tversky and the genesis of that 1974 article, Danny says they went through 30-odd versions of prospect theory. What kept them going was Amos' often-used phrase "Let's do it right." They did, and in what Kahneman has kept on doing, he keeps showing us how to get it right.

_____

Steven Pinker
Johnstone Family Professor, Department of Psychology; Harvard University; Author, The Better Angels of Our Nature 

As many Edge readers know, my recent work has involved presenting copious data indicating that rates of violence have fallen over the years, decades, and centuries, including the number of annual deaths in war, terrorism, and homicide. Most people find this claim incredible on the face of it. Why the discrepancy between data and belief? The answer comes right out of Danny's work with Amos Tversky on the Availability Heuristic. People estimate the probability of an event by the ease of recovering vivid examples from memory. As I explained, "Scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people's impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions."

The availability heuristic also explains a paradox in people's perception of the risks of terrorism. The world was turned upside-down in response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. But putting aside the entirely hypothetical scenario of nuclear terrorism, even the worst terrorist attacks kill a trifling number of people compared to other causes of violent death such as war, genocide, and homicide, to say nothing of other risks of death. Terrorists know this, and draw disproportionate attention to their grievances by killing a relatively small number of innocent people in the most attention-getting ways they can think of.

Even the perceived probability of nuclear terrorism is almost certainly exaggerated by the imaginability of the scenario (predicted at various times to be near-certain by 1990, 2000, 2005, and 2010, and notoriously justifying the 2003 invasion of Iraq). I did an internet survey which showed that people judge it more probable that "a nuclear bomb would be set off in the United States or Israel by a terrorist group that obtained it from Iran" than that "a nuclear bomb would be set off." It's an excellent example of Kahneman and Tversky's Conjunction Fallacy, which they famously illustrated with the articulate activist Linda, who was judged more likely to be feminist bank teller than a bank teller. _____ 

Nicholas A. Christakis
Physician and Social Scientist, Yale University; Coauthor, Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives

I heard of Danny in 1974 when I was 12, when my father, a nuclear physicist, handed me a copy of a paper that Danny and Amos Tversky had just published in Science. I first met him when I was in my 40's, when I had gone to Princeton to give a talk. And I now count him as a friend. But in the intervening decades, he had a profound effect on people like me who work at the intersection of the natural and social sciences—not so much (or only) because of the content of his thinking, but rather because of the manner of his research—because Danny's brilliant way of working highlighted how one could practice a beautiful kind of syncretic science.

Hence, Danny's work influenced my own not so much in what he did (though I always was stimulated by his ideas), but rather in how he did it. In this regard, I think the intellectual impact that Danny has had, and that I can discern both in myself and in many, many others, has been twofold. First, he has shown how conversations across broad swaths of science can take place. He created new knowledge not just by sheer force of mind, but also by seeing lacunae and overlaps and complementarities in disparate fields. Second, he palpably demonstrated how iconoclastic thinking is still the best kind of thinking in science—and how such thinking can still, sometimes, have a big impact in the course of a lifetime. If you want to discover something new, do something different.

These sorts of intellectual models are crucial to scientific activity, I think, and they are not mere clichés. One of the rewarding things about a life in science is that it affords one the opportunity to engage in a conversation, stretching back centuries, and spreading out over space and disciplines, with other kindred pilgrims. Danny provided not just a model of where to go, pointing in new directions, but also a model of what sort of light to use and what sort of rhythm of walking, and running, to adopt.

_____

Rory Sutherland
Executive Creative Director and Vice-Chairman, OgilvyOne London; Vice-Chairman, Ogilvy & Mather UK; Columnist, the Spectator

Loss aversion was, of course, widely understood by the advertising industry long before it was adopted by economists. The slogan "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" suggests that people might be willing to pay a significant premium to avoid the small chance of a disastrous outcome.

The advertising industry seems to have known about anchoring, too. It was a copywriter for the agency N W Ayer (possibly Frances Gerety, one of the models for Peggy In Mad Men) who wrote the headline for De Beers to promote engagement rings: "How else can a month's salary last a lifetime?".

Like the TV game-show industry, we managed to discover all this stuff on our own because, by a happy accident, almost no-one in our industry knew anything about economics at all. And therefore it never occurred to us to try to understand human behaviour by first pretending that emotions such as regret, embarrassment or mistrust do not exist.

By assuming "perfect rationality, perfect information and perfect trust", bad economics has created a world where efficiency is all that matters; where ethics, psychology and perception can be ignored; and (possible self-serving bias here) where brands, marketing and advertising should not exist. As one climate scientist said to me recently, if you ask any conventional economist "How do we get people to do X?" the answer, though dressed up in fancier language, always amounts to the same thing: "By bribing them to do it or fining them for not doing it." That is a very limited toolkit with which to work.

This being Edge, there are people far more qualified than I am to write about his work on Prospect Theory, Base-Rate Neglect, Hedonics, Affect Forecasting or—a personal favourite—on his "failure to disagree" with Gary Klein. What I can add from my own field is a note about another really important achievement of his last few years: the fact that he has become a brand. This is more important than you may think.

When I met Danny in London in 2009 he diffidently said that the only hope he had for his work was that "it might lead to a better kind of gossip"—where people discuss each other's motivations and behaviour in slightly more intelligent terms. To someone from an industry where a new flavour-variant of toothpaste is presented as being an earth-changing event, this seemed an incredibly modest aspiration for such important work.

However, if this was his aim, he has surely succeeded. When I meet people, I now use what I call "the Kahneman heuristic". You simply ask people "Have you read Danny Kahneman's book?" If the answer is yes, you know (p>0.95) that the conversation will be more interesting, wide-ranging and open-minded than otherwise.

And it then occurred to me that his aim—for better conversations—was perhaps not modest at all. Multiplied a millionfold it may very important indeed. In the social sciences, I think it is fair to say, the good ideas are not always influential and the influential ideas are not always good. Kahneman's work is now both good and influential.

We now think it perfectly normal that physical objects are designed to work with the way our bodies have evolved; this is why the keyboard on which I am typing this is reasonably congruent with the size of my hands, and why I do not steer my car with my nose. Yet many programmes and services are designed not for the brains of humans but of Vulcans. Thanks in large part to Kahneman and his many collaborators pupils and acolytes, this can and will change.