Like many other Jews, I suppose, I grew up in a world that consisted exclusively of people and words, and most of the words were about people. Nature barely existed, and I never learned to identify flowers or to appreciate animals. But the people my mother liked to talk about with her friends and with my father were fascinating in their complexity. Some people were better than others, but the best were far from perfect and no one was simply bad.

In one experience I remember vividly, there was a rich range of shades. It must have been late 1941 or early 1942. Jews were required to wear the Star of David and to obey a 6 p.m. curfew. I had gone to play with a Christian friend and had stayed too late. I turned my brown sweater inside out to walk the few blocks home. As I was walking down an empty street, I saw a German soldier approaching. He was wearing the black uniform that I had been told to fear more than others — the one worn by specially recruited SS soldiers. As I came closer to him, trying to walk fast, I noticed that he was looking at me intently. Then he beckoned me over, picked me up, and hugged me. I was terrified that he would notice the star inside my sweater. 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. I went home more certain than ever that my mother was right: people were endlessly complicated and interesting.

The first essay, written before I turned eleven, was a discussion of faith. It approvingly quoted Pascal's saying "Faith is God made perceptible to the heart", then went on to point out that this genuine spiritual experience was probably rare and unreliable, and that cathedrals and organ music had been created to generate a more reliable, ersatz version of the thrills of faith. The child who wrote this had some aptitude for psychology, and a great need for a normal life.

The questions that interested me in my teens were philosophical — the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the reasons not to misbehave. But I was discovering that I was more interested in what made people believe in God than I was in whether God existed, and I was more curious about the origins of people's peculiar convictions about right and wrong than I was about ethics. When I went for vocational guidance, psychology emerged as the top recommendation, with economics not too far behind.

— Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize Biography (2002)