Now when you start having stereotypes of social groups, it’s the human mind at work. So I have a stereotype of a table, I have a stereotype of chairs. A form of stereotyping is involved in understanding the world. This is despite the fact that the group studying the latter is far larger. When told of a student, Tom, who has a preference for neat and tidy systems and a penchant for sci-fi, most of us guess that he’s studying computer sciences and not a humanities subject. The same applies to our habit of predicting stereotypical outcomes at the expense of what’s known about the world. But it “is built so deeply into the structure of the mind that you couldn’t change it without changing many other things”.

It is the bias he says he would most like to eliminate if he had a magic wand. The most damaging of these is overconfidence: the kind of optimism that leads governments to believe that wars are quickly winnable and capital projects will come in on budget despite statistics predicting exactly the opposite. Not even he believes that the various flaws that bedevil decision-making can be successfully corrected. What’s fascinating is that Kahneman’s work explicitly swims against the current of human thought. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, professor of risk engineering and author of The Black Swan, places it “in the same league as The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith and The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud”. Despite that, it has sold millions of copies around the world. It is a challenging work, clearly written but stuffed even so with difficult problems and counter-intuitive explanations. It tells the story of “two systems” of thought, one automatic and intuitive, the realm of systematic biases, the other conscious and deliberative. His 2011 book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, a primer on a career’s worth of psychological inquiry, won the US National Academy of Sciences book award, and the enthusiastic approval of his peers.

Brave writer the wand