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A Note on the Passing of Dr. Daniel Kahneman


This week I’d like to note the passing of psychology researcher, Princeton professor, and Nobel laureate in Dr. Daniel Kahneman on March 27, at the age of 90. Dr. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics (there is no Nobel prize in psychology) for essentially inventing the field of behavioral economics with his colleague Amos Tversky. Kahneman writes that his interest in understanding people grew out of childhood experiences as a Jewish boy in Nazi-occupied France, for instance when a German SS soldier treated him well simply because he was wearing his sweater (with its identifying Star of David) inside-out. As his Nobel acceptance speech, Dr. Kahneman wrote a short treatise about the functioning of the narrative and intuitive minds, which he described as providing the underlying basis for his groundbreaking behavioral economics findings. He later expanded that speech to a book-length treatment titled Thinking, Fast and Slow, which popularized cognitive neuroscience.

Kahneman's work provided one of the most important underpinnings of my own Two Minds Theory. If you look at the table on this page showing differences between the Narrative and Intuitive minds, you can see that only the bottom two items in each column are original ideas. I want to acknowledge here that my theory is essentially a refinement or elaboration of Kahneman's, rather than a new theory on its own. In my initial theory paper, I started by using Kahneman's own terms for the two minds, System 1 and System 2, only changing them because the editor of the journal Nursing Research didn't feel they were adequately descriptive. I have acknowledged this intellectual debt even while arguing that my version of Two Minds Theory might provide a simpler explanation for some phenomena than the lists of heuristics and biases that are common in behavioral economics circles. Many other behavioral-economic scholars, including 2017 Nobel laureate Richard Thaler who co-wrote the book Nudge, owe a great debt to Kahneman's ideas. As Sir Isaac Newton said, we see furthest when we stand on the shoulders of giants. 

I must also say a word about Dr. Kahneman's final book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, which can be read as an argument to turn many areas of human decision-making over to more logical and consistent algorithmic approaches, such as those provided by artificial intelligence. I have critiqued that view, and raised other concerns about recent developments in generative AI. (For the record, Noise was published in May 2021, a full year before the AI revolution popularized by ChatGPT). Kahneman's argument in Noise flows straightforwardly from his earlier ideas about the supremacy of Narrative over Intuitive modes of thought. If slow and logical Narrative thinking is always better, and fallible humans are not biologically equipped to do this type of thinking consistently, should we not make the logical decision to hand over our decisions to a different type of thinker without our human flaws? My counter-argument is that the best human decision-making actually relies on the Intuitive system as well as the Narrative mind. The combination of our two minds is what allows humanity to be at our wisest, for instance in the realms of legal judgments or scientific conclusions. Algorithms therefore may be a useful adjunct to human decision-making, but they can never replace it. Kahneman himself noted the limitations of his last work: 

I view the book as premature in a way. I started thinking about noise six or seven years ago and now a book is coming out. That, in principle, is too soon. That is, when you have a relatively big idea, you know, 20 years is a better time frame than six. I started when I was in my 80s, so I just didn’t have the luxury. There are fascinating questions, like the one you raised of noise in a cross-cultural context, that I would have loved to explore and in 20 years, I would have gotten to it, I and my collaborators. In six years, this is what we managed to accomplish.

Sadly, he was correct. But insights from Kahneman's propect theory, his new field of behavioral economics, and his ideas about algorithms will continue to be important influences on many people's work, including my own, as we explore new understandings of decisions and behavior.

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