Hello I'm Kirsty Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island

discs from BBC Radio 4. For rights reasons the music choices are shorter than in

the radio broadcast. For more information about the program, please visit BBC.co.uk.

Radio 4. My castaway this week is the psychologist Daniel Carnaman, whose work in the fields of judgment and decision-making led to him being awarded the Nobel Prize for economics.

His work has revealed extraordinary truths about our emotional happiness,

our life satisfaction,

and something called behavioral economics,

what motivates individuals and institutions to make the

financial choices they do. He is a much valued voice of wisdom amid the global economic

crisis. At 16 he says he already had a pretty good idea of

where he wanted to be going. Maybe his Jewish family's flight from Nazi occupied France

and his father's untimely death six weeks before D-Day helped focus

his mind on what was important.

He says, my mother had a big influence.

In fact, I credit her with the fact that I became a psychologist because she got me interested

in people and listening to gossip.

I've been fascinated by gossip ever since.

So let's start then, Danny, with gossip. That seems to me a pretty brave utterance for

an academic. We don't really associate intellectual rigor with the idea that gossip can

be a good thing. Well you, what I have noticed is that, at least for myself, I'm a great deal better at finding

mistakes in what other people do than in what I do. And I think it's generally the case that people see others much more

clearly than they see themselves. And I think also for people who anticipate gossip, they tend to make better decisions than if they didn't anticipate gossip.

...