One evening Daniel violated the curfew for Jews and found himself face-to-face with a German soldier in SS uniform, who, he saw to his horror, was staring at him intently: “Then he beckoned to me, picked me up, and hugged me,” Kahneman recalled in a memoir. “He was speaking to me with great emotion, in German. When he put me down, he opened his wallet, showed me a picture of a boy, and gave me some money.”
He also recalled a young Frenchman, a Nazi collaborator and passionate anti-Semite, being so fooled by his sister’s disguise as to fall in love with her: “After the liberation, she took enormous pleasure in finding him and letting him know he had fallen in love with a Jew.”
Kahneman’s father died as a result of untreated diabetes in 1944, and after the war his mother moved the family to Palestine, soon to become Israel, where Kahneman obtained a degree in psychology and mathematics from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem before being drafted into the Israel defence forces as a platoon leader. Transferred to the psychology branch, he found himself frustrated by the system for assessing candidates for officer training, which relied heavily on intuition.
He went on to design a structured-interview system, which required interviewers to measure young men on six dimensions in a specific order, and only then use their intuition to imagine what kind of soldiers they would make. The system is still in place today.