To be fair, this sort of learning is a lot harder than we think.
For well more than five decades, the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman has been examining and explaining human attitudes and behavior. His disarmingly simple experiments and profoundly expert analysis have dramatically altered the way we see human reason.
Philosophers and social scientists had assumed for centuries that humans are inherently rational. Kahneman’s powerful legacy (largely created with his late colleague Amos Tversky) comes in two parts. The first is that we are not nearly as rational as we tend to assume. Relatedly, we also aren’t as smart and skilled as we readily assume. We are routinely burdened by the “
hubris hypothesis” (for example, as an
important study found, physicians “who were ‘completely certain’ of the diagnosis ante-mortem were wrong 40 percent of the time”). Thus, as Martha Deevy, director of the Financial Security Division at Stanford’s Center on Longevity
points out, “investment fraud works best on highly educated men, who think they’re too smart to be scammed.”