Kahneman: The Method

He spent fifty years finding out how judgement fails, including his own

A course on the thought of Daniel Kahneman.

Psychology

What you will learn

• States what the law of small numbers is a claim about, and whose belief it describes.
• Describes the questionnaire study and reports what the expert participants got wrong.
• Explains why a belief about samples produces overconfidence in results that came out.
• Applies the sample-size question to a result presented without one.
• States what the two systems are and, precisely, what Kahneman denies about them.
• Explains why a fiction with agents in it is easier to reason with than a mechanism.
• Reports the pupil measurements and what they establish that the metaphor cannot.
• Uses the bat-and-ball result to distinguish not knowing from not checking.

Course outline

1. The Law of Small Numbers — Before any of the famous work, Tversky and I found something about researchers. Asked how many observations an experiment needs, experienced investigators — including the authors of two statistics…
2. Two Fictitious Characters — System 1 and System 2 are the part of my work everyone knows, and I said in the book that they are fictitious characters with no home in the brain. What is not fictitious is the effort. Before any of…
3. Losses Loom Larger — In 1979 Tversky and I published the paper the Nobel committee cited. Its claim is not that people are irrational. It is that economics had put the wrong thing on the axis: what moves us is not how…
4. Disbelief Is Not an Option — Chapter 4 of my book describes priming — the finding that stimuli you never noticed change what you do next — and then makes an unusual demand of the reader. Chapter 10 of the same book gives that…
5. Two Papers, One Dataset — In 2022 a meta-analysis of more than two hundred nudging studies — over two million observations — reported that choice architecture works. In the same journal, in the same year, a second team took…
6. A Conflict Resolved — In 2010 Deaton and I reported that emotional well-being stops improving with income above about $75,000. In 2021 Killingsworth reported, in his title, that it rises above $75,000. Rather than argue…

Works read in this course

• Belief in the Law of Small Numbers (1971) — with Amos Tversky, in Psychological Bulletin — the finding that researchers, including statisticians, expect small samples to behave like large ones.
• Prospect Theory (1979) — with Amos Tversky, in Econometrica — the paper the Nobel cited, and the one that put a reference point where economics had put a level of wealth.
• Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) — Farrar, Straus and Giroux — the summary of a career, and the source of both the two-systems metaphor and the sentence this course reads back to him.
• Noise (2021) — with Sibony and Sunstein — the late claim that the field spent decades on bias and missed a larger source of error.
• Income and Emotional Well-Being: A Conflict Resolved (2023) — with Killingsworth and Mellers, in PNAS — an adversarial collaboration against his own most-quoted finding.

Terms introduced

the law of small numbers, adversarial collaboration, choice architecture, publication bias

Part of the Simposeum course library.