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Daniel Kahneman in September 2022 in New York City

Photo: Rob Kim / New York Protest Movement / Getty Images

The influential behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman is dead. He died at the age of 90, as his partner Barbara Tversky confirmed to the New York Times and his stepdaughter Deborah Treisman to the Washington Post.

Kahneman was born in Tel Aviv in 1934 and grew up in France. He comes from a Lithuanian-Jewish family. He received his doctorate in psychology in the USA and later taught in places such as Jerusalem and Berkeley, California.

In 2002, Kahneman received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with Vernon L. Smith, colloquially known as the Nobel Prize in Economics.

He developed the underlying prospect theory with the scientist Amos Tversky, who died in 1996. It is considered one of the foundations of behavioral economics, a field of economics that deals with human behavior in economic situations.

Traditional economics assumes that people act primarily rationally in economic contexts. Behavioral economists see things differently and investigate how biases influence actions.

How easily people can be influenced to pay more for their coffee

Kahmeman's 2011 book “Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow,” written for the general public, became a bestseller. In it he describes two ways the brain works when thinking: the fast, unconscious, emotional and intuitive

system 1

and the slower, more logical, conscious

system 2

.

According to Kahneman, unconscious, rapid thinking leads to so-called cognitive distortions: unconscious pitfalls and systematic errors in thinking, perceiving and remembering. This includes, for example, overestimating your own knowledge.

In an interview with SPIEGEL in 2012, Kahneman reported on an example from his book: According to this, people's willingness to pay money into a coffee fund can be easily influenced. "You just have to make sure the right picture is hanging over the money box," Kahneman said. »If a pair of eyes looks from the wall, people pay twice as much as they would for a picture of flowers. Those who feel like they are being watched act more morally.«

(Read the entire 2012 conversation here.)

Kahneman's partner, Barbara Tversky, is a professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University. Her former husband was Kahnemann's research colleague Amos Tversky, who died in 1996. Kahneman and Barbara Tversky had been living as a couple for a few years.

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