I’m not a person who has idols, but Daniel Kahneman came about as close as it gets for me. It is not an exaggeration to say that he revolutionized our understanding of the mind.
Among many other concepts, Kahneman and his collaborators came up with the ideas of:
- Anchoring (where an irrelevant number can influence our judgments)
- Prospect theory (a theory of how we make judgments when there is uncertainty that incorporates a number of biases)
- The focusing illusion (where we overemphasize the importance of whatever factor we happen to be focused on at that moment)
- The peak-end rule (where our memories of an event tend to emphasize the peak moment of greatest intensity and how the event ended)
- The planning fallacy (the common bias where people underestimate the time and cost of large projects)
- The availability heuristic (where we evaluate how frequent, likely, or important an event is based on how easily we can recall examples of it to memory)
- The representativeness heuristic (where we evaluate how likely something is to be something else based on how similar it is to a prototype or stereotype rather than incorporating all the information we have, such as base rate information)
I feel grateful to have had the chance to spend a little bit of time with him. He was as wonderful in person as he was in his articles. I once even thought I found an error in one of his papers, and he was so nice about it when I pointed it out. It turns out I misinterpreted what method he used, and the paper was flawless!
The world has suffered a great loss today.
This piece was first written on March 27, 2024, and first appeared on my website on April 11, 2024.
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