Daniel Kahneman Obituary, Death – Daniel Kahneman, an Israeli-American psychologist and best-selling book, passed away on March 27. His study, which won the Nobel Prize and revolutionized the field of economics, as well as other fields ranging from sports to public health, demonstrated the extent to which people abandon reasoning and jump to conclusions. He was ninety!
The New Yorker’s fiction editor Deborah Treisman, who was his stepdaughter, said that she had received confirmation of his passing. She did not disclose the location or manner in which he passed away. Dr. Kahneman’s research is most well-known for its ability to disprove the concept of “homo economicus,” often known as the “economic man.” This concept has been around since the time of Adam Smith, and it was thought that the economic man is a rational entity who acts out of self-interest. Instead, Dr. Kahneman discovered that people rely on cerebral shortcuts, which frequently result in decisions that are not in their own best interest and are often detrimental to their well-being.
According to a statement made by Dr. Kahneman, humans “are much too influenced by recent events,” which is the reason why these erroneous decisions occur. “Under certain circumstances, they are much too quick to draw conclusions, and under other circumstances, they are much too slow to change,” the author writes. When he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2002, Dr. Kahneman was a member of the Princeton University community. He was awarded the prize “for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, particularly concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty.”
The award was shared by Vernon L. Smith, who was a pioneer in the field of economics and working at the time at George Mason University in Virginia. Smith was the recipient of the award shared by him. The ability of individuals to reason their way through a problem was not something that Dr. Kahneman had much faith in. In his well-known book “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” which was published in 2011, he makes the observation that “many people are overconfident and prone to placing too much faith in their intuitions.” “It would appear that they find cognitive effort to be at least somewhat unpleasant, and they try to avoid it as much as they can.”
A significant portion of Dr. Kahneman’s career was spent working alongside the psychologist Amos Tversky, whom he believed should receive a significant portion of the credit for their work that won prizes. However, Tversky passed away in 1996, and the Nobel Prize is never granted after a person’s death. Each of the two men had attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where they had both studied and lectured, and both of them were atheist grandsons of Lithuanian rabbis. The friendship and close partnership that they shared for three decades, which was documented in Michael Lewis’s book “The Undoing Project” published in 2016, was a textbook example of contrasting elements.
Lewis asserts that Tversky was the person who brought the party to life, whereas Dr. Kahneman was never even present. The only thing that was on Tversky’s desk was a mechanical pencil, while Dr. Kahneman’s office was crammed with works of literature and articles that he had never completed. However, according to Dr. Kahneman, there were instances when it seemed as though “we were sharing a mind.” As a result of the closeness of their collaboration, they decided to use a coin to determine which of their names would appear first on a book or an article.
Their research not only contributed to the development of the discipline of behavioral economics, which is the application of psychological insights to the study of economic decision-making, but it also had a significant impact outside the confines of the academic world. The manner in which baseball scouts evaluate prospects, governments formulate public policy, and medical professionals arrive at diagnoses was credited with being altered as a result of this. “Judgments Under Uncertainty,” an early study written by Dr. Kahneman and Tversky, served as a source of inspiration for the establishment of the notion of “libertarian paternalism,” which was established by economist Richard Thaler and legal expert Cass Sunstein. In their book “Nudge,” which was published in 2008, Thaler and Sunstein proposed various methods by which governments may encourage individuals to prepare for retirement, take care of their health, and make other rational choices with minimal interference from authorized authorities.
Dr. Kahneman presented his ideas to a general audience in “Thinking, Fast and Slow,” which distinguished between two modes of thought: System 1, in which the mind, acting quickly, relies on intuition, immediate impressions and emotional reactions; and System 2, in which the mind, slowing down, functions more rationally and analytically and is able to correct errors made by System 1.
Dr. Kahneman proposed that the majority of the time, the mind operates in System 1 and draws conclusions by utilizing the toolbox that System 1 provides, which includes cognitive biases, rules of thumb, and anything else that aids in the acceleration of the judgment process.
A number of cognitive biases were demonstrated through studies that were conducted by Dr. Kahneman and Tversky. As an illustration of what is known as the framing effect, they demonstrated, for instance, that a significantly larger number of individuals were willing to travel twenty minutes in order to save five dollars on the cost of a calculator that cost fifteen dollars, as opposed to making the same trip in order to save the same amount of money, five dollars, on a calculator that cost one hundred twenty-five dollars.
Students were told about a fictitious Linda, who was 31 years old and had been an activist in college. Linda “was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations,” according to the statement that was made in another experiment conducted by Kahneman and Tversky.
