The most important lessons about life are not taught in school or college. Or, as Oscar Wilde said, “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.” How to navigate human relationships, manage personal finances, handle organisational dysfunction, deal with winning and losing, make important decisions including who to marry and who to vote for, how to overcome our own very human frailties — most of us muddle our way through these highly consequential aspects of life.
Kahneman’s central message could not be more clear or more critical. Left to our own devices, we are likely to make judgements and take decisions based on fallacies, delusions and systematic biases. If we want to make better decisions in our personal lives and as a society, we need to be aware of our biases and find ways to work around them.
Kahneman’s view of the human condition was a tragic one. His work demonstrated that we are all, without exception, born with cognitive quirks that make us deeply and inherently flawed, and it is our fate to live with this tragedy. His research revealed our tendency to think that other people have biases but not us. It demonstrated that we are typically overconfident in our opinions, impressions and judgements and that we exaggerate how knowable the world is: “Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: Our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
Even more unfortunately in today’s world, where content is created by the minute in unimaginable volumes and disseminated via algorithms that prioritise virality and engagement over accuracy, Kahneman’s work shows how susceptible we are to well-told stories. And how eager we are to imagine realities that help rationalise our beliefs and actions. In his own words: “The confidence people have in their beliefs is not a measure of the quality of evidence but of the coherence of the story the mind has managed to construct.”
As anyone living in India understands only too well, the brazenness of the political class in exaggerating achievements, claiming credit, and promoting themselves as messiahs knows no bounds. Yet the relentless campaigning short-circuits any cognitive recognition we might have of the bombastic hard-selling. Again, in Kahneman’s words — “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.”
So, when deciding who to marry his advice was to think carefully about whether genuine long-term affection is likely: “Not expecting that your feelings will remain exactly the same as they are now… will be quite a useful thought to have when people marry… this is a person you love now, but you are going to have to like them later. And that’s quite important.”
Another key takeaway from Kahneman’s work is that choice is effortful: “Thinking is to humans as swimming is to cats; they can do it, but they’d prefer not to.”
An ever-burgeoning number of options is not conducive to our happiness and creates stress in our decision-making. Online marketplaces that limit the number of options we see on screen, provide us with best-seller recommendations, and tempt us with “those who bought this item also bought these” nudges, are simplifying decision-making using learnings from Kahneman and Tversky’s work.
Kahneman’s contributions in co-creating the field of behavioural economics have had immense implications acknowledged across policymaking, financial markets, organisational behaviour, and consumer decision-making. Above all, he has given us a deeper understanding of ourselves.
The writer is a marketing and consumer research professional
