© David Plunkert
In 2002, Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel in economic science. What made this unusual is that Kahneman is a psychologist. Specifically, he is one-half of a pair of psychologists who, beginning in the early 1970s, set out to dismantle an entity long dear to economic theorists: that arch-rational decision maker known as Homo economicus. The other half of the dismantling duo, Amos Tversky, died in 1996 at the age of 59. Had Tversky lived, he would certainly have shared the Nobel with Kahneman, his longtime collaborator and dear friend.
Human irrationality is Kahneman's great theme. There are essentially three phases to his career. In the first, he and Tversky did a series of ingenious experiments that revealed twenty or so "cognitive biases" -
unconscious errors of reasoning that distort our judgment of the world. Typical of these is the "anchoring effect": our tendency to be influenced by irrelevant numbers that we happen to be exposed to. (In one experiment, for instance, experienced German judges were inclined to give a shoplifter a longer sentence if they had just rolled a pair of dice loaded to give a high number.) In the second phase, Kahneman and Tversky showed that
people making decisions under uncertain conditions do not behave in the way that economic models have traditionally assumed; they do not "maximize utility." The two then developed an alternative account of decision making, one more faithful to human psychology, which they called "prospect theory." (It was for this achievement that Kahneman was awarded the Nobel.) In the third phase of his career, mainly after the death of Tversky, Kahneman has delved into "hedonic psychology":
the science of happiness, its nature and its causes. His findings in this area have proved disquieting - and not just because one of the key experiments involved a deliberately prolonged colonoscopy.
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