Daniel Kahneman, the psychologist who received the Nobel Prize for economics, has died

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Prize laureate who championed development in the field of economic psychology, has died, reports the British The Guardian. The academic of Israeli-American origin lived to be 90 years old.

Kahneman’s death was confirmed in a statement by Princeton University, where the academic worked. “After he appeared on the scene, many areas of the social sciences were not the same. We will miss him greatly,” wrote his former colleague and university employee Professor Eldar Shafir.

In 2002, Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in Economics for his contribution to the study of the psychological behavior of actors.

Kahneman, together with his longtime colleague Amos Tversky, developed the theory of cognitive heuristics. These are mental shortcuts that the human brain has developed to handle large amounts of information. These shortcuts (sometimes called cognitive errors) then often lead to measurable and predictable errors.

In their 1974 paper, Kahneman and Tversky described three such cognitive biases: availability bias (our brain overestimates the likelihood of events it can easily recall), stereotyping (the brain’s tendency to pigeonhole itself according to external characteristics), and anchoring (the brain’s tendency to relate new information to the currently displayed number). Thus, a completely new discipline was born called behavioral economics or decision science.

Since then, scientists from all over the world have found and described more than a hundred other cognitive errors. Kahneman later wrote his view of these fallacies in popular science form into a bestseller Thinking fast and slow.

Canadian psychologist Steven Pinker said of Kahneman that he is the most influential psychologist in the world. In 2015, The Economist magazine named him the seventh most influential world economist.

But Kahneman himself said that he did not aspire to any such success. “I had limited ambitions, I did not aspire to great success. I was very hardworking, but I didn’t expect to become a famous psychologist,” he said in an interview with The Guardian in 2015.