Daniel Kahneman: belief

Transcript context

…I have a question about bounded rationality over time. With the rise of the internet, the rise of more readily available information — so many prices, things you can see on Amazon — all this price discrimination and differentiation across products has grown with that. Do you think that people’s biases are improving or getting worse over time as more information, for example, over the past 20, 30 years, has become more readily available? To the extent that you think of biases as representing human nature in a broad cultural context, it hasn’t changed over the last 30 years. Human nature hasn’t changed. In certain domains, it’s much easier to be rational when you can look things up, when you can search on the computer instead of going out and searching, as you had to when I was a young person. Then, of course, you can achieve more rational results than you could. But whether it has changed anything significant, I doubt it. And what is very striking over the last few years is that it’s not only information that is readily available. Misinformation is also readily available. So the net effect . . . It used to be very clear that this is all to the good, but what we’re seeing in the last few years is that there is a very heavy cost to the availability and the ease of expression that transmits itself over the internet. Next question.…

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