Daniel Kahneman receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013 (Image: U.S. White House)

SFI Business Network

Intuition works less often than we think, noted Daniel Kahneman, winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, during a recent meeting of the Santa Fe Institute's Business Network.

What about the chess master's intuition? The financier's expertise? The doctor's perspective that cannot be captured by data and models?

In a discussion that took place during an October 2015 SFI Business Network meeting at Morgan Stanley headquarters in New York, Kahneman explored intuition, data, and decision making with Michael Mauboussin, Managing Director of Credit Suisse and Chair of SFI’s Board of Trustees.

The SFI Business Network holds topical meetings for its members like the one at Morgan Stanley six to eight times per year in the U.S. and internationally. Readers interested in further information about the Business Network should visit here or contact Casey Cox (casey@santafe.edu), coordinator of the Business Network.

Watch the video conversation (90 minutes)

Kahneman shared anecdotes along with research from Paul Meehl suggesting that the “outside view” of non-causal and statistical models for evaluation trounced the “inside view” favored by intuition in every recorded example.

Where intuition performs best, he said, is when it is anchored in the data-informed “outside view” and disciplined by immediate feedback.

Daniel Kahneman is a pioneering scholar of psychology. After escaping Nazi occupation in World War II, he immigrated to Israel, where he served in the Israel Defense Forces and trained as a psychologist. Alongside Amos Tversky, he applied cognitive psychology to economic analysis, laying the foundation for a new field of research and earning the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. He is currently a professor at Princeton University.

Read the blog post on Compounding My Interests (October 20, 2015)