He found that people rely on shortcuts that often lead them to make wrongheaded decisions that go against their own best interestNobel laureate Daniel Kahneman in 2009. He spent much of his career at Princeton University, where he was a professor of psychology and public affairs.
Dr. Kahneman took a dim view of people’s ability to think their way through a problem. “Many people are overconfident, prone to place too much faith in their intuitions,” he wrote in, “Thinking, Fast and Slow.” “They apparently find cognitive effort at least mildly unpleasant and avoid it as much as possible.”
Inspired in part by “Judgments Under Uncertainty,” an early paper by Dr. Kahneman and Tversky, economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein developed the concept of “libertarian paternalism.” Thaler and Sunstein’s 2008 book, “Nudge,” suggested ways that governments could encourage people to save for retirement, take care of their health and make other intelligent choices with minimal intrusion by authorities.
In another Kahneman-Tversky experiment, students were told about a fictitious Linda, 31, who was an activist in college and “was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice, and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.”Then the students were asked which was more likely: that Linda is a bank teller or that Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.
During World War II, he was forced to wear a Star of David after Nazi German forces occupied the city in 1940. One night in 1941 or ’42, he later recalled, he stayed out past the German-imposed curfew for Jews while visiting a friend, and he turned his sweater inside out to hide the star while he walked a few blocks home. He then crossed paths with a soldier in the SS, who called him over, picked him up — and hugged him.for the Nobel Prize ceremonies.