How Daniel Kahneman cut through the noise

At the time, both books were best-sellers and regularly cited alongside other widely read titles such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink. After I finished Lindstrom and Ariely’s books, I realised that the best sections in both owed their existence to the same man: Daniel Kahneman, the Nobel-winning psychologist, economist and writer who died last week, at the age of 90.

The problem with Ariely’s book was its preferred mode of operation: It would open a new chapter with a case study, build layer upon layer of theory, and then make a clumsy attempt to both demonstrate and over-simplify the theory, with America-centric examples of consumer behaviour. It felt like Ariely was unsure about his target audience, torn between writing for fellow economists and a more general audience. Kahneman’s book, on the other hand, the best-selling Thinking, Fast And Slow (2011), provided a much more holistic picture. The examples Kahneman used were globally applicable for the most part, and crucially, his language had much more scientific rigour and thoroughness. He was the rare pop-science author who knew exactly how to balance accessibility and academic rigour.

Kahneman, now recognised as one of the founding fathers of behavioural economics, upended “conventional wisdom" among economists—the assumption that consumers make perfectly rational decisions, guided by the “expected utility" derived from those decisions.

In Thinking, Fast And Slow, Kahneman draws a distinction between two modes of thought. Fast thinking involves rapid and instinctive thinking, guided more by emotion than rationality. Slow thinking involves deliberate, deconstructive logic that arrives at a conclusion after a careful assessment of outcomes. Kahneman’s great achievement was to demonstrate the wide-ranging applications of this theory—in market economics, in political decision-making and more.

Thinking, Fast And Slow was essentially a summary of a lifetime of research for Kahneman and his frequent collaborators, like Amos Tversky and later, Richard Thaler (the economist who later made a cameo appearance in the movie The Big Short, explaining the “hot hand fallacy" in decision-making). In order to better understand the seeds of Kahneman’s theory, one should read his early publications through the 1970s and 1980s, mostly in psychology journals and later, academic presses.

In Attention And Effort (1973), Kahneman’s first book-length publication, he lays down the basic elements of his theory. One of the book’s objectives is to “integrate the intensive and selective aspects of attention". These twin concepts form the bedrock of the book and are a precursor to the fundamental ideas in Thinking, Fast And Slow. Kahneman cites experiments conducted with dogs, cats and other mammals to show that when presented with a wide range of stimuli, all creatures “select" which stimulus to respond to and which to ignore. This is the “selective" aspect of attention. But there is more to attention than merely choosing what to listen to. The “intensive" aspect of attention dictates the extent to which we respond—in other words, “effort". And effort can always be measured with heart rate, pulse rate, pupil dilation and more.

“Some types of information-processing activities can be triggered solely by an input of information. Others require an additional input of attention or effort. Because the total quantity of effort which can be exerted at any one time is limited, concurrent activities which require attention tend to interfere with one another," he writes.

Kahneman processes the intensive and selective aspects of attention by using a combination of two historical models—the “bottleneck" model and the “capacity" model. The former assumes that some stimuli are too complicated to process concurrently with other things, thereby acting as “bottlenecks" for the cognitive process. The latter, “capacity" model sees the human mind as a kind of channel-processing device with limited bandwidth. We have the freedom to process “parallel" signals, but run the risk of weak signals or an abundance of “noise". As Kahneman shows, a combination of both models can be applied to break down human decision-making.

I write about streaming shows and films a lot, and applying Kahneman’s theory to this world reveals the logic behind a lot of trends in this industry. Consider the way streaming algorithms suggest content to the user. It collates your previous choices—choices that speak to “fast" thinking, for the most part, instinctive and axiomatic, because we know what we like to watch.

The algorithm then uses “slow" thinking, deconstructing our favourite stories into individual components—certain actors, certain genres. Finally, it pushes these choices on to the top of our screens while we are scrolling, pre-empting the average user’s “slow" thinking (the average user needs to make fast and reliable entertainment choices at the end of a long working day).

Or, to use another example, think about what Netflix et al call “second screen" content—things to watch while you are doing something else, like scrolling through your Instagram feed. These films and shows cannot be too cerebral or challenging because they are not vying for your undivided attention, or “effort" as Kahneman put it. They are following the capacity model of attention which presents the brain with limited bandwidth and a seemingly infinite ability to process parallel signals.

I arrived at Attention And Effort only after reading Thinking, Fast And Slow, but it made a huge impression on me, and led me to Kahneman’s other academic work, including the landmark Heuristics And Biases: The Psychology Of Intuitive Judgment (2002), which Kahneman edited alongside Thomas Gilovich and Dale Griffin.

The introductory essay in this book ought to be required reading for contemporary policymakers. Even when I didn’t understand everything on the page, Kahneman’s writing was lucid enough to communicate the applications of his ideas (Yanis Varoufakis is another economist who’s very good at this). I wish more academics, especially those whose research has the potential to alter lives significantly, wrote in Kahneman’s clear, no-obfuscation, minimal-jargon manner.

Aditya Mani Jha is a Delhi-based writer.