Book | The Undoing Project - 2: Daniel Kahneman (probably... an INFP)

Book review, The Undoing Project - 

This post is also the reason why I am breaking this book into such small pieces, rearranging the order, and posting summaries of what I read even before I have finished preparing my actual presentation slides on Thinking, Fast and Slow. 
Through the previous study sessions, after researching across many books, authors, and expert sites, I found it strange that there are an enormous number of psychology keywords, all with extremely similar interpretations, and that these dozens or even hundreds of keywords are all already several decades old. What also struck me was that the keywords created in psychology's early days seem to repeat themselves like the original texts of the Bible. The only thing that changes is the reinterpretation according to each new generation. The reason, I suspect, is that the field keeps focusing only on the what. 
Then I came across this book. Its content unfolds in the form of storytelling, biography, or a kind of essay, describing how famous authors created certain keywords through small everyday moments of their era and how they argued over them. The most striking part of all was the section about Daniel Kahneman, who passed away not long ago.  

1. Background of the publication of The Undoing Project 
?   2. About Danny, the protagonist of Thinking, Fast and Slow
3. About Amos, co-researcher of Prospect Theory 
4. Joint research, between cool reason and burning passion  
5. That person- even if they leave me 

Daniel Kahneman is an Israeli-born American psychologist and economist. He won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. His academic contributions span cognitive psychology, judgment and decision-making (Prospect Theory, 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics), behavioral economics, and the psychology of happiness. Together with Amos Tversky and other scholars, he laid the foundation for cognitive research on heuristics and the universal human errors that arise from biases, and he formulated Prospect Theory. As a result of this achievement, he received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, and he is currently a professor at Princeton University's SPIA (formerly the Woodrow Wilson School). (Image and text - Wikipedia)
 
 

From early childhood, Danny had an abstract interest in people. Why do people think the way they do? Why do people behave the way they do? His chances to meet people directly were limited. He went to school but avoided personal contact with teachers and classmates. So he had no friends. Even just being known by people could put your life in danger. Yet, while keeping a certain distance, he observed a great deal of fascinating behavior. He thought there was no way for either his teachers or the bartender to fail to recognize that he was Jewish. p.57 
 
 
 

During the war

As the Germans began withdrawing from France, Danny and his mother walked freely around Paris, looking for whatever might still be left of their old home and their belongings. Danny carried with him a notebook he had titled 'What I Write of What I Think' ("I clearly couldn't bear it"). While in Paris, he was inspired by reading Pascal in his sister's textbook, and he wrote in the notebook. 
At that time, Germany was making one last attempt to retake France, and Danny and his mother lived in fear that the attempt might actually succeed. As he wrote, Danny tried to explain why human beings need religion. Quoting Pascal, he wrote, "Faith is what makes God plausible inside the heart." And then he added his own words: "That's it! Cathedrals and organs are devices for artificially producing exactly that kind of feeling." He no longer regarded God as someone to pray to.
Later in life, looking back, he remembered the bravado of his childhood, and felt both proud and embarrassed by it. He thought that his unchildlike writing was "deeply connected to the realization that I was a Jew with only a head and no usable body, and the realization that I would never fit in with other children." 
Almost all Israelis are drafted into the army as soon as they finish high school. But Danny's intellectual abilities were recognized, so he was allowed to go straight to university and earn a degree in psychology.
 
 
 

Toward the end of the war

Danny did not accept Israel's offer of a new identity. He chose to assign himself to a region. It was hard to pin down exactly what kind of identity it would be. Danny himself was the kind of person who was difficult to define. He didn't seem to want to settle in any particular place. The things he attached himself to seemed loose and temporary.
Ruth Ginzburg, who at the time was dating Ariel Ginzburg and would soon marry him, said, "Danny made up his mind very early on that he was not going to take on responsibility. To me, it always seemed like there was, deep inside Danny, a constant need to rationalize his own rootlessness. A person who doesn't need roots, someone who sees life as a series of accidents - 'this is how my life turned out, but it could have unfolded differently.' In a situation where you've denied God, you choose the best of what's left."
In a land filled with people starved for a region and a nation to belong to, Danny's lack of any such yearning stood out conspicuously.

For him, questions about human beings were more interesting than any other kind of question. "My interest in psychology was my way of doing philosophy. Why do people - and especially I - look at the world the way we do? I tried to understand the world by understanding that question. By that point, the question of whether God existed had already disappeared from my list of concerns, but why people believed God existed was, to me, a fascinating subject. I wasn't very interested in right and wrong, but I was extremely interested in anger. Looking back now, that's exactly what a psychologist would be, isn't it?"

 

Psychology at the time

Psychology at that time was crowded with various groups of specialists wearing the label of "psychology" - psychoanalysts, behaviorists, Gestalt psychologists, and so on - but no one listened to what the others had to say. Psychology was unlike physics, and even unlike economics. There was not a single persuasive theory capable of organizing psychology in a systematic way, nor any agreed-upon rules of debate. 

School 1. Behaviorism

If we cannot directly observe what is happening inside the head, how can we even pretend to study it? What deserved scientific attention - and what could be scientifically studied - was the way an organism behaved. The school that exemplified this approach to studying the mind was called "Behaviorism." During World War II, Skinner was tasked by the U.S. Air Force with training pigeons to guide bombs, and that is how he started his work in this area. Skinner taught pigeons to peck precisely at a target as soon as it appeared on a screen, and rewarded them with food when they succeeded (the pigeons became passive when anti-aircraft shells exploded around them, so they were never actually used in combat). With Skinner's success in this experiment, his idea that all animal behavior is triggered not by thought and feeling but by external rewards and punishments began to exert astonishing influence. p.71

Behaviorist psychologists asserted that everything they had discovered in experiments with rats and pigeons applied to human beings as well. At the same time, they considered that, for various reasons, experimenting on humans was not very practical. In an essay titled "How to Teach Animals," Skinner wrote: "You have to start a program in which you sometimes apply the relevant reinforcement and sometimes withhold it. If you do this, you are likely to elicit certain emotions (in humans). Unfortunately, behavioral science has not yet been as successful at controlling emotion as at controlling behavior." Behaviorism was attractive because its scientific approach seemed clear. The stimulus could be observed, the response recorded. At first glance, it appeared 'objective.' Behaviorism did not rely on verbal reports to grasp thoughts or feelings. The only thing that mattered was observability and measurability. Skinner himself was fond of a joke about this seemingly spotless behaviorism: After making love, one partner says to the other, "You enjoyed it. How was it for me?"

The leading behaviorists of the 1950s were all WASPs, that is, White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. But none of the young people of that era took notice of this fact. Looking back at psychology of the time, the contrast was so stark that one almost wishes there had been an explicitly separate 'WASP psychology' and 'Jewish psychology'. WASPs marched proudly around their white laboratories in lab coats, holding clipboards, dreaming up new ways to torture rats, and kept on avoiding the messy problem of human experience. The Jews, on the other hand, while looking down on Freud's methods, longed for 'objectivity' and, hungry for truth that could be verified scientifically, willingly embraced precisely those messy problems. 

School 2. Gestalt

Beginning in early 20th-century Berlin, this school of psychology was led mainly by German Jews who sought to scientifically explore the mysteries of the human mind. Gestalt psychologists discovered fascinating phenomena and demonstrated them with astonishing skill.
Light looks brighter when it shines in darkness; gray looks green when surrounded by purple, and yellow when surrounded by blue; when you say "banana eel - don't step on it!", people are convinced they heard "banana peel - don't step on it!" - and so on.

The Gestalt psychologists demonstrated that the human mind so often interferes with external stimuli in odd ways that there is no clear, definite relationship between the stimulus itself and the sensation it produces inside us.
Danny was particularly impressed by the Gestaltists' way of letting readers experience for themselves the strange phenomena going on in their own heads. For example, on a clear night when you look up at the sky, the moment you see them, certain stars stand out from their surroundings and group themselves into a single cluster. The constellations of Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper are like that. p.74

The Gestalt psychologists pondered the questions that the behaviorists had decided to ignore. How does the brain create meaning? How does the brain assemble the fragments collected by the senses into a coherent picture of reality? Why does that picture seem more like something the head has imposed on the surrounding world than something the surrounding world has injected into the head? How does a person turn fragments of memory into a single coherent life story? Why does a person interpret what they see differently depending on the context?

These were questions that even the smartest laboratory rat could never answer. If there were answers, they could only be found inside the human head. 

 
Danny also, like other Jewish psychologists, tried to pursue objectivity. He felt strong attraction to the way the Gestalt school posed its questions. Phenomena he had personally lived through and witnessed - questions like why, when a regime obsessed with exterminating Jews rose to power in Europe, did some Jews see what was coming and flee, while others stayed behind and were slaughtered? - were the kind of questions that drew him into psychology. 
 
 

After World War I

In 1948, the then prime minister David Ben-Gurion declared that Israel was open to all Jews around the world. Over the next five years, Israel took in over 730,000 immigrants from different cultures and different languages. The newborn nation thus faced a serious problem.

In a country made up of all these different people, how do you put together a single combat unit?

Many of the young men who joined the new Israeli Defense Forces had already lived through unspeakable horrors. People with numbers tattooed on their arms (the prisoner numbers from Nazi concentration camps) were visible everywhere. But no one openly spoke about their wartime experience. Anyone who suffered from trauma was treated as weak. To become an Israeli Jew, you had to at least pretend to forget what could not be forgotten.

Israel was still more like a fortress than a state, and the army was a barely controlled chaos. The soldiers were not properly trained, and the unit organization was a mess. The commanders of armored divisions did not even speak the same language as their men. In the early 1950s, even though there was no formal war between Arabs and Jews, mindless violence regularly erupted, exposing how powerless the Israeli army was. Soldiers would flee at the slightest hint of trouble, and officers refused to lead from the front. And it was to this unreliable army that the task of conscripting new young men and assigning them to the right roles was placed in the hands of psychologists. 
 
 

Officer, Danny

Danny had no trouble identifying men who would make good officers. "We declared without hesitation: 'This guy will never make it', 'That guy is just so-so', 'That guy will be a star.'" But then, by comparing his predictions with the actual outcomes, he discovered a problem. When he compared his early predictions to how the various candidates actually performed once they entered officer training, his predictions turned out to be utter nonsense. But this was the army and the work had to get done, so they kept doing what they had been doing. And, true to Danny's nature, he noticed that he still felt confident about the work despite the fact. The situation, he thought, resembled the famous Müller-Lyer illusion.
What Danny found difficult was measuring those traits accurately through ordinary interviews. The subtle difficulty of evaluating others had been described back in 1915 by American psychologist Edward Thorndike. A soldier who initially received an overall high rating tended afterward to be rated as more physically robust than he actually was. "The halo of overall merit influences the assessment of specific abilities, and conversely, the halo of a specific ability influences the assessment of overall merit." Thorndike's conclusion was: "Even outstanding floor supervisors, employers, teachers, and department heads cannot perceive an individual as a mixture of distinct traits and rate one trait independently of another." This is where the term 'halo effect', still in use today, originated.
Danny knew about the halo effect. And he could see that the same effect was operating in the Israeli military interviewers of the time. p.83
The personality test scores Danny developed did predict something: the likelihood that a recruit would 'do well at any task.' Even more astonishing was that this result correlated only weakly with intelligence or education. In other words, it provided information that simple measures of intelligence and education could not capture. This score, sometimes called the 'Kahneman score', made it possible to use the population more effectively in the military, and especially when selecting military leaders, to reduce reliance on raw, measurable intelligence and to elevate the importance of the qualities Danny had identified. p.86
Sometimes, in his capacity as a researcher, he was invited to the U.S. Department of Defense in Washington, D.C., where he was asked questions like 'You and we have the same guns, the same tanks, the same airplanes - so how is it that you keep winning every battle while we don't? We know it's not the weapons. It must be a psychological problem. How do you select the soldiers who go into battle?' 
In fact, the questions that the Israeli military or the U.S. Department of Defense were asking Danny - "Which kind of personality is best suited for which military role?" - were, to him, absurd. He was being asked to make personality predictions about Israeli young men. So he posed a more productive question: "How do we prevent interviewers from ruining their evaluations by relying on intuition?" In the process, Danny discovered something new. He had been asked a specific problem and had stumbled onto a general truth.

If you let go of intuition, you can make better judgments!

Later, when Danny became a university professor, he often told his students:
"When somebody says something, don't ask yourself whether what they said is true. Instead, ask yourself in what kind of case that statement applies." That, he said, was his intellectual instinct, and the natural first step into the loop of thought. Whatever someone has just said, accept it - and instead of dismantling it, try to understand it.
 
 

Research style  

When some idea or ambition seized him, he would throw himself at it like fire, then suffer a great disappointment and abandon it. "If something isn't working, you shouldn't kill yourself sticking with it - you should move on to the next idea." 

"I always think there are plenty of ideas to go around."

In a normal society, it would be hard to find much practical value in Danny Kahneman. But Israel was not a normal society. 
At one point Danny was caught up in a new passion and developed a whole batch of experiments similar to the marshmallow experiment. He even came up with a name for his line of research: 'The psychology of single questions.'
In one example, he gathered Israeli children, told them they were going camping, and asked them to choose whether they would sleep in a 1-person, 2-person, or 8-person tent. Danny thought the children's answers might give a glimpse of their sense of belonging. But he didn't get any meaningful results. Even when he thought he had found something, the result wouldn't replicate in follow-up experiments. He gave up on the experiment. "I wanted to be a scientist, and I thought I couldn't be a scientist unless I could replicate my findings - and in the end, I just couldn't replicate them." Once again doubting himself, he gave up personality research entirely, concluding that he had no talent for it. 
The salary at Hebrew University was low, so Danny was quietly teaching extra courses on the side as a kind of side job. One student who took his introductory statistics course said the class might sound dull but was anything but, adding: "All the examples were drawn from real life, so it felt vivid. He didn't just teach statistics - he taught what statistics actually meant."
Danny's wild swings of mood were a weakness, but - sometimes consciously, sometimes not - they were also a strength. Thanks to that capriciousness, Danny almost unconsciously expanded the boundaries of his own self.

As it turned out, he never actually had to decide what kind of psychologist to become. He could be many different kinds of psychologists, and he would be. Even as he lost confidence in his ability to study personality, he wondered if perhaps he could study vision, and so he set up a laboratory.

Danny's passions shifted quickly, and he was quick to admit failure. Almost as if he had expected it. But he was not afraid of failure. He took on anything. And he came to think of himself as someone who actively enjoyed changing his mind. "Whenever I find a flaw in my own thinking, it feels like I've discovered something new and made progress." According to him, he varied with his churning moods. When he was depressed, he gave up easily, and as a result, even when failure came, he was neither surprised nor flustered (a theory he proved with his own life).

When his mood was good, he overflowed with enthusiasm and seemed to forget about the possibility of failure, so he would explore every idea that came to mind. His Hebrew University colleague, the psychologist Maya Bar-Hillel, said of Danny: "His unpredictable mood swings were enough to drive people crazy. One day he'd say something was a stroke of genius, and the next day he'd call the same thing nonsense, and the day after that he'd call it genius again, and the day after that, nonsense." What drove others mad might have been Danny's secret to staying sane. For him, mood was the lubricant that kept the idea factory running.
If there was any common thread to Danny's varied intellectual curiosity beyond his own interest, it was hard for outsiders to spot it. Daliah Etzion said:
"He had no ability to distinguish between what was a waste of time and what wasn't. He saw absolutely everything as something that could potentially be interesting."
Danny didn't trust psychoanalysis ("I always thought psychoanalysis was just word-play") - but when the American psychoanalyst David Rapaport invited him to spend the summer at the Austen Riggs Center, a psychiatric treatment facility in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, Danny accepted the invitation.

 
 
Lifestyle  
To the people who saw Danny every day, Danny was an inscrutable figure. The image of Danny inside other people's heads was forever changing.
Like the figures used in Gestalt psychologists' experiments. A former colleague said: "Danny's mood swung from one extreme to the other. You never knew which Danny you were going to meet. He was easily wounded, and starved for respect and affection. He was extremely sensitive, easily swayed by his surroundings, and quick to feel insulted."

He smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. He got married, had a son and a daughter, but to others, Danny still seemed to be a man buried in his work. Zur Shapira, who had been Danny's student and later became a professor at New York University, said: "He's someone who puts work above everything else. It would be hard to call him a happy man." His mood put a distance between him and others. It was a distance born out of severe inner suffering. Yaffa Singer, who worked with him in the psychology unit of the Israeli Defense Forces, said he "triggered a protective instinct in women." Danny's assistant Daliah Etzion also remarked: "The professor was always uncertain. Once I went to see him and he was deeply depressed. He was teaching a class at the time, and he said, 'My students obviously don't like me.' I thought, what on earth is the problem? It was strange. The students adored him." Another colleague said: "Danny was like Woody Allen without the humor."