Daniel Kahneman

I'm interested specifically in another kind of problem, judgment problems, where basically you're considering options or you're evaluating a situation and you're trying to give it a score.

There is advice, I think, on how to do it.

For me, it goes back to something I did in the Israeli army when I was like 22 years old.

So that's a long time ago, like 63 years ago.

I was a psychologist in the Israeli army.

And I was assigned the job of setting up an interviewing system for the army that predicted

but, you know, this was the beginning of the state of Israel, so people were improvising all over the place.

I had a BA, and I was, I think I was the best trained psychologist in the army.

My boss was a chemist.

Brilliant.

But anyway, and the existing system,

was one where people would interview and try to form an intuitive global image of how well that recruit would do as a combat soldier, which was the object of the interview.

And because I had read a book

at Paul Neal, I took a different talk.

And the different talk was I identified six traits that I sort of made up, and I had them ask questions and evaluate each of these traits independently and score it and write down the score, then go on to the next trait.

And they had to do it for all six traits.

That's all I asked them to do.

And the interviewers, who were about one year younger than I, all recruits, but very, very smart, selected for being good at it, they were furious with me.

And they were furious with me because they wanted to exercise their intuition.

And I still remember that one of them said, you're turning us into robots.