Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
2 appearances
Psychologist awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics for work on judgment, decision making, and behavioral economics.
On the island
Eight records
Well, the first one is American Pie and for me it's related to a particular experience when my career really was about to take off. I met a hero of mine. His name was Dick Neisser and he was, you know, a generation ahead of me and I visited him at Cornell in his lab and we clicked and I had had an idea in a topic on which he was an expert and he said let's go home and think about it. And we went to his place and he was playing this record and he played it several times because I asked him to play it several times and that's my memory.
When I was four years old I lived in Paris. That was just before the war and we were well to do and the maid, I suppose when my mother wasn't home, made me croon to the other maids. It was all around a courtyard and all the kitchens faced the courtyard and I sang a song and that's the first song I remembered.
Shirat Hanoded (The Wanderer Song)
I moved to Israel from France at age twelve. And it was a complete transformation for me… there is a song which was the very first Hebrew song I learned. And it stayed in my memory. The words sounded very funny to me as a child. They still do. And there is something sentimental and warm about the song that I have always loved.
Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, Op. 73 'Emperor' (2nd movement)
When I was about thirteen and we had moved to Israel and I was living with an aunt and she had a gramophone. And I fell in love with a piece of music, and it's the first piece of music I fell in love with, and it's Schnabel's recording of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto, and I have loved it all my life.
During my adolescence, Danny Kaye was a hero of mine. And I stored many sentences from his songs, in particular one that was quite important to my thinking. And in fact, there's a chapter in my book that comes directly from Danny Kaye. And he describes a favorite form of exercise as jumping to conclusions.
We're going to hear the music that was actually in the background when Amos Tversky and I were working. It was the late sixties and the early seventies were the era of the Beatles for us. And so we're going to hear my favorite Beatles song.
Clarinet Quintet in A major, K. 581
Gervase de Peyer (clarinet), Amadeus Quartet
There was a long period of my life when I was writing and working with background music. That period came to a fairly abrupt end actually when I realized that I was much better at writing in silence than with the music. But for years I didn't know that. And I had of course a few favourites, some Schubert, some Mozart, and the selection I've picked is one of my all-time favourites.
Piano Suite (unspecified) — played by Ori ShohanFavourite
I was in Israel and my grandson, who is sixteen, played a piece of music for me. And I said, Oh, that's the solution to my problem. And here is my grandson playing the piano. He recorded it for me.
In conversation
Presenter asks
3:59Can you explain to people simply how emotional happiness and life satisfaction differ?
Emotional happiness is how you feel about your life while you're living it. And life satisfaction is how you feel about your life when you're thinking about it. And we live it all the time. We think about it occasionally. … Life satisfaction is very important to people. In fact, I think people do more to achieve satisfaction than to achieve happiness.
Presenter asks
10:18Tell me about your mother, what sort of person was she?
My mother was a big influence on me. She was a pessimist. She was very clever, she was a gossip, she loved talking about and was always a good and a bad side. I think my interest in people started with my mother.
Presenter asks
10:36You've written about an instance when, as a little boy, you were wearing a sweater which had to have the Star of David sewn on it, and you turned the sweater inside out. Can you give our listeners a little more of that story?
Yes, well in 1941 the Germans declared a curfew on Jews. That was before extermination really began. And I overstayed the curfew. I was with a friend and I had to come back home. And the street was deserted, but there was a German soldier walking toward me and he was wearing black. And black were the SS. They were the worst of the worst. … And he beckoned me. … And I went, and he picked me up, and I remember that my great fear was that he would see inside my sweater. … But he didn't. … And he hugged me, and he opened his wallet, and there was a picture of a little boy. … And that was his son. And that to me was really an example of the complexity of human nature.
The keepsakes
The book
I will take the Thesaurus and I have plans for it. You know, the thesaurus are synonyms, but they're not quite synonyms, and I think there is a lifetime of activity finding differences between neo-synonyms, so that's the game I will play on the desert island.
The luxury
I would like to take my home recliner, if I may. It's the perfect chair, and I've owned chairs like that for the last twenty five years.
Presenter asks
19:48You won the Nobel Prize for economics for work you had done in collaboration with Amos Tversky. Tell me about that collaboration.
I'm an extraordinarily lucky individual because I formed a friendship early on with my colleague Amos Tversky, whom many people considered the most intelligent person they had ever met. And we got together, we liked each other. And he made me funny. He was funny always. And so for about fifteen years we were essentially inseparable intellectually and physically. We spent a lot of our time together. … And we just had a shared mind which was better than either of our separate minds. Very few people have that luck.
Presenter asks
20:39Can you explain prospect theory to all of us in the most boiled down straightforward way?
What was slightly different about prospect theory from what had existed before, most theories of decision making up to that point had been theories of how people should behave, of what is a rational way to behave. … And we just wanted to describe the decision that people do make intuitively, their intuitive preferences. … Two essential deviations or departures that we made from the way that things were conceived earlier, and they have been very influential. … one of our discoveries, in quote, was loss aversion, that people are much more sensitive to losses than to equivalent gains. … We're going to toss a coin. … And depending on where it lands, you will either lose ten pounds or you will win X. … And now I ask you in all candor, what would X have to be for that gamble to be attractive to you? … And it turns out it's not ten and a penny, it's a lot more. In fact, for most people it's more than twenty pounds. So in order to compensate for the loss of ten pounds, you need a gain of more than twenty. That's what we call loss aversion.
Presenter asks
29:37What can we do when we're at the centre of a storm to make ourselves cope with it in a way that will be more psychologically healthy?
Look at an underutilized resource as friends. … People must have friends that they can consult in a crisis because people cannot decide to be wise. … They can trust someone who says I can tell you I know how you will feel a year from now. You can't, because you are with your feelings right now. … That is wisdom that friends can impart. And if I have one piece of advice for people well, two one is pick the right goals, pick goals that you can meet. … and spend a lot of time with friends.
“I'm a born pessimist, and I don't feel life that way. I think there are many advantages to being a born pessimist. I'm never disappointed.”
“We should think of living, and not only of remembering.”
“My worst memory, but it will give you the feeling of what it was like. There was a year when it was too dangerous to go to school, so I stayed home. … And every night I would pray to God and I … I knew that it was war time, that God was very busy, but I was asking for another day. … I mean, every day the possibility was there of being caught and of its being the last day.”
“It's that complexity of human nature that I find fascinating.”
“She died the year I got the Nobel Prize. She died actually six months earlier. And that was one of my biggest regrets. Possibly the first thing I thought of was that she didn't get to get the news.”