Psychologist Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2002, has died

Psychologist, professor and writer Daniel Kahneman, who in 2002 won the Nobel Prize in Economics without having training in the field, died this Wednesday at the age of 90, revealed his wife, fellow psychologist Barbara Tversy.

Barbara Tversy reported Daniel Kahneman’s death to the New York Times, without indicating the location.

Kahneman (Israel, 1934), who shared the Nobel Prize with Vernon Smith, stood out for demonstrating how human beings make decisions, especially in situations of uncertainty, which can be observed in the phenomenon of loss aversion.

The psychologist, who lived in Manhattan, New York, took advantage of his training as a psychologist to advance in what was called behavioral economics.

His work, which he carried out mainly during the 1970s, led to a rethinking of issues such as medical malpractice and international political negotiations, which he analyzed, mainly alongside Amos Tversky, a cognitive psychologist at Stanford University, with whom he worked for much of the your career.

His research helped establish the field of behavioral economics, which applies psychological insights to the study of economic decision-making, but it also had a far-reaching effect outside academia, The Washington Post noted.

Kahneman, who spent his childhood in France, where his parents arrived in the 1920s, discovered that people resort to intellectual shortcuts that often lead to poor decisions that go against their own interests and that these decisions occur because humans ” are too influenced by recent events.”

His public recognition was largely based on his book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ [‘Pensar, Depressa e Devagar’, em português]published in 2011 and placed on best-seller lists in science and business, in which he explained his discoveries in an engaging writing style, using illustrations that even non-professional readers could interact with, highlighted the New York Times.

Much of his work is based on the notion (which he did not create, but rather organized and advanced) that the mind operates in two modes: fast and intuitive (mental activities we are more or less born with, called System One). , or slow and analytical, a more complex mode that involves experience and requires effort (System Two), the newspaper further detailed.

“I’m the grandfather of behavioral economics”, he highlighted to the Times in 2016, when they interviewed him for this obituary, the newspaper also highlighted.

Kahmenan, who in 2002 won the Bank of Sweden’s Prize for Economic Sciences in memory of Alfred Nobel, has taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of British Columbia, the University of California at Berkeley and Princeton University.