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TOM GILOVICH: I went to college wanting to be a lawyer and I
took a psychology class, liked it, took another one, liked it,
and someday, went hey, I'm taking all of these psychology
courses, that must mean something and, maybe this is
what I want to do. And so I took a year off after I
was an undergraduate to figure out did I really want to
go to graduate school and get a PhD
and become a psychologist and after a year working
in the business world I decided, yeah, I did want to
do that and I went to school. To graduate school, planning to
study one thing, and the very first class I took Amos Tversky
and Danny Kahneman were visiting Stanford, and they presented
this work that I had never heard of on before judgment and
decision making that was just stunningly impressive. And so I
sort of went hey, I want to be more like them. And so I
switched over to that field and it's, I'm really glad I did.
It was an exciting time to get involved in an area. They were
so influential in helping us to understand judgment and decision
making it was an exciting time to be a part of that.
As a scientist don't worry so much about is it all adding up
to a coherent story. What's your career about, are you the
person who does this or that? Just do research that you find
interesting, and after the fact you'll look back and it will
cohere much more than you think right now. So if you're worried
about, oh, can I do this when I'm this kind of a person, can I
do that, doesn't matter. Do what's most interesting, you'll
be most productive, and then you'll figure out its bigger
meaning later and that also encourages inter disciplinary
research. If you're a psychologist, don't limit
yourself to psychological questions; if the question
you've raised is really something better handled by an
economist, learn some of the tools of the economist and do
that research yourself.
We used to grow fruits and vegetables in the backyard and
like a lot of kids you've – hey, I wonder what would happen if we
put this around them or we tried to cross this with that. I
don't even remember, we weren't Gregor Mendel, we weren't doing
any clever things of cross breeding, but a lot of stupid
stuff. Let's pour salt around the base and see if that kills
them. And as a kid you're kind of were as interested in the
failures, oh, cool, they're all dead as the successes like, wow,
look at that bounty. So a lot of it was just playing with
fruits and vegetables.
As a scientist you pretty much every day can come to work and
ask yourself what do I want to do today? And that's – sounds a
lot like the question what do I have to do today, but those are
as different as questions. If you start your day with what do
I have to today that often sends you down a track of why did I –
how did I end up here? What do I want to do today, on the other
hand, leads you down a different more intrinsically motivated
path. And as a scientist you have to be productive but you
can pick what you want to be productive at. The job is do
something that the scientific community considers worthwhile
and the scientific community is broad, so you can work on all
sorts of things. That kind of autonomy is very conducive to
wellbeing. If you look at all the jobs that people really
like, they tend to be jobs where they're autonomous, where you
don't really have a boss.
That's a hard one I'm going to – because two things come to mind
and I don't know which one is more important. One is just
curiosity, the notion of hmm, why did that happen and being
curious about it rather than depressed by it. I think that's
an important attribute and that's related to this other
attribute that how do you respond to failure.
You have a prediction that doesn't happen,
you can be crushed or you can say,
that's weird what's happening. Or even if it's not so much
being curious but it's like – then it gets your competitive
spirit going like, wait a minute, that didn't work what's
going on? We've got to retool and so that kind of picking
yourself off the ground and starting over again is
predictive of who's going to be a good scientist; how do you
respond to failure?
I do work in this field of Judgment and Decision Making
which a lot of people have made lots of contributions, and I
think that field has an enormous amount to offer because we make
consequential decisions all the time. And they aren't always
easy, we don't always do them well and what this research
program is about is trying to figure how the mind works, so
that we understand why some decisions are easy and why we
tend to do certain things very well and why some decisions are
hard and we tend to do them poorly. And the hope there, and
there's evidence for this, is we're providing lots of
information to help us understand those difficult
decisions and give people the tools, so that they
can make better decisions so they less often in life are
going down paths that don't serve them well.
Well, Kahneman-Tversky who really revolutionized the field
of Judgment/Decision Making, they – I wouldn't be in this
field if it wasn't for them and they by far have had the
greatest impact on me. I've had the great opportunity to have
worked with both of them and just learned a lot about what
other kinds of questions to ask and how to go about answering
them. Above and beyond that a person I only met one time and
never worked with him, a pioneer and Social Psychologist, Stanley
Schachter, has always been influential in an indirect way,
that is reading about his research. He inspired lots of
people to be social psychologists because he just
did the coolest stuff and he was just kind of – I would call it
fearless, that is to say he didn't feel, oh, I'm a social
psychologist so I'm only going to work on this. If the
question came up that meant, all right, we did everything we
could from – with the tools of the Social Psychologist but
those aren't enough, now we need to understand how the stomach
works, or how the tongue works to understand obesity, let's
become physiological psychologists. And that sort of
created this – no, these things that seem like barriers really
aren't barriers. And, so, I feel like I owe a lot
to Stanley Schachter.
People would be surprised at how simultaneous, there's some ways
in which we know a lot more than you would ever be able to expect
and a lot of ways in which we just know very little.
Oh, well, that used to be a hard question, now, it's easy. We
have to keep all of it – as we always should of and we always
did, but it wasn't mandatory keep our data for seven years.
I forget what it is so we've got to take the computer files
because if you're – if you can't show people your data you're in
big trouble. So, now, that's an easy one. There's no choice,
run in, let the photo albums burn, let the mementos burn,
you've got to get your data.
That's funny should ask that question because I start every
lecture in my Social Psychology course with music as people are
coming in, so that I can shut it off and everyone shuts up. If
you're in a room where music's playing and it turns off you're
just going to stop talking. So if you tried to start a lecture
by, okay, everyone, let's get started now, so it takes a
couple of minutes but if you're playing music and you just cut
it off, everyone's ready for you to talk. And, so, after using
it I thought might as well go the next step if I'm lecturing
about something why I don't have the music match the theme of the
lecture. So I'm often listening to music that's contemporary
that the students know to try to hear lyrics that would fit to
the music that's being played now. Lately, I've been
listening to – I have forced a couple of these into my
lectures, they don't fit that well but I just love the music.
I've been listening to a lot of Regina Spektor lately and –
but, I'll listen to all sorts of music.