Nobel laureate and behavioral economics pioneer Daniel Kahneman has died

Kahneman and his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky changed the shape of the field of economics, which before their work assumed that people are rational acts capable of clearly evaluating decisions, such as how to buy a car or what job to accept.

The research of the couple, which Kahneman described for the lay public in his 2011 bestseller Mylen, fast and slow, was interested in how decisive is the form of subliminal subtleties and mental shortcuts that can dictate our thoughts in an irrational but teachable way.

The Israeli-American academic won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 for bringing elements of psychological research into this field, especially when it comes to evaluating the situation and decision-making of an economic subject in an atmosphere of uncertainty. Ekonomov claims that Tversky would have won the prize with him if he had not died in 1996. The Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.

The most influential psychologist

Daniel Kahneman turned psychology into economics. At the meeting of the 20th century economics separated from psychology. The problem was that economics did not require specific assumptions about how people make decisions. According to this approach, people react mainly to changes in prices and income, because their preferences are independent of these changes, explained Marek Hudk from the Faculty of Business Administration of the VE.

Since his arrival on the scene, many areas of social science have not been as free as two, his former colleague and behavioral scientist Eldar Shafir said in a press release. Canadian-American experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist Steven Pinker once called Kahneman the most influential psychologist in the world.

My favorite Kahneman article examines the perception of price changes from the perspective of productivity. Consumers are willing to accept extra prices, which are caused by extra costs of companies. The rise in prices as a result of the rise in demand is considered to be negative, adds Hudk.

Kahneman was born in 1934 in Tel Aviv. During the Second World War he went to France and returned to Israel in 1946. He finished his bachelor’s studies in psychology and mathematics in 1954 at the Jewish University in Jerusalem. He received his doctorate in psychology from the University of California at Berkeley in 1961. Meanwhile, he served in the Israeli army, where he introduced a system of entrance interviews with conscripts. This system was used for several hundred years. Since 1993, he has worked at Princeton University.

His partner, Barbara Tversk, widow of Amos Tversk and a professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University, said the family would not announce the death or death. I had limited ambitions, I didn’t want a big rush, Kahneman told The Guardian in 2015. I was very hardworking, but I didn’t expect to be a famous psychologist, he added.