Daniel Kahneman: belief

Transcript context

…Some questions about psychologists outside of what you’ve worked on, but maybe related — Freud. What do you think of Freud’s body of work? And has it influenced you at all? If I think of Freud’s two principles of mental functioning, right? The notion of pleasure principle, reality principle — it’s a little bit like Thinking, Fast and Slow in some ways, with big differences. Well, all dichotomies are alike in some ways. [laughter] And yeah, there are similarities. Oddly enough, there is one aspect of Freudian work that I think did influence me. For some reason, when I was a graduate student . . . It’s too long a story, but I was exposed to chapter 7 in The Interpretation of Dreams, and I spent a summer studying chapter 7 in The Interpretation of Dreams. In chapter 7, there is, basically, a theory of attention. And 25 years later, I published a theory of attention. When it was done, I realized that it resembled chapter 7 quite a bit. So, yes. Personality psychology and five-factor personality theory — is that, for you, a useful way of thinking about human beings?…

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