- Person
- Daniel Kahneman
- Lived
- 1934–2024
- Field
- Psychology, behavioural economics
- From
- Israeli-American
The story
Daniel Kahneman, born in Tel Aviv in 1934 and raised in Paris, became one of the most influential psychologists of his time through his work with Amos Tversky on judgment and decision-making. That work drew fierce criticism. Some critics argued that he and Tversky had exaggerated the flaws of human thinking; others ran experiments designed to make the illusions they had described disappear.
Kahneman was appalled by the tone of such debates in the social sciences, where critics and authors traded rebuttals in which, as he put it, hardly anyone ever admits an error or acknowledges learning anything from the other. He disliked controversies in which no minds would be changed, and for years he declined to referee papers whose tone was snide.
As an alternative he championed what he called adversarial collaboration. Researchers who disagree make a good-faith effort to settle their dispute by designing and carrying out joint research together. In some cases an agreed arbiter leads the project and collects the data. Because the two sides are not expected to reach complete agreement, the result is usually an unusual joint paper in which the remaining disagreements are set out openly.
Kahneman practised what he preached. By 2002 he had taken part in three adversarial collaborations: with Tom Gilovich and Victoria Medvec, with Ralph Hertwig, with Barbara Mellers acting as arbiter, and with a group of experimental economists in Britain. An appendix to the 2001 paper with Mellers and Hertwig set out a detailed protocol for others to follow. When two other colleagues, Dan Ariely and George Loewenstein, criticised his work, they wrote a joint piece that began with what they agreed on before debating their differences.
In his Nobel autobiography Kahneman wrote that he hoped more efficient ways of conducting controversies would be part of his legacy. An earlier example of the approach had appeared in 1988 in research on goal-setting, and Kahneman, apparently unaware of it, developed his own protocol about a decade later and may have been the first to use the term. The idea has since spread: the psychologist Philip Tetlock and others have promoted it as a way for science to correct itself, and the University of Pennsylvania has created an Adversarial Collaboration Project to encourage it.
Why it matters
Adversarial collaboration offers a constructive model for disagreement in science, encouraging honesty and shared standards of evidence.
About Daniel Kahneman
Child survivor of Nazi-occupied France who, with Amos Tversky, mapped the systematic errors of human judgment, founded behavioural economics and won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics.
More about Daniel Kahneman
- Daniel Kahneman showed how framing flips our choicesKahneman and Tversky showed that two logically identical descriptions of a choice, such as lives saved versus lives lost, can lead people to opposite decisions.
- Daniel Kahneman named the illusion of validityWatching army officer candidates, Daniel Kahneman noticed that assessors stayed confident despite proof their predictions failed. He called it the illusion of validity, his first cognitive illusion.
- Daniel Kahneman built the Israeli army's recruit interviewAt 21, Daniel Kahneman designed a structured interview for all Israeli combat recruits. It roughly tripled the interviews' predictive power and stayed in use for decades.
- Daniel Kahneman found how we remember painDaniel Kahneman showed that memories of painful experiences depend mostly on their worst moment and their end, the peak-end rule, a finding that can make medical procedures easier to bear.
- Prospect theory became the most cited paper in economicsDaniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky's 1979 paper on prospect theory, showing how people really weigh gains and losses, became the most cited paper in economics.
- Daniel Kahneman showed the eye's pupil tracks mental effortWith Jackson Beatty, Daniel Kahneman discovered that people's pupils dilate steadily as they hold more digits in memory, giving scientists a window onto mental effort.
- Daniel Kahneman's eureka moment about praise and blameWhen an Israeli flight instructor insisted that shouting worked better than praise, Daniel Kahneman realised he was seeing regression to the mean, the most satisfying eureka of his career.
- Thinking, Fast and Slow brought Kahneman's ideas to millionsDaniel Kahneman's 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, describing fast intuitive and slow deliberate thinking, became an international bestseller and won major book awards.
- Kahneman and Tversky mapped the mind's shortcutsIn 1974 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky published Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases, showing how mental shortcuts lead to predictable errors.
- Kahneman's theory helped launch behavioural economicsWhen a 1975 draft of prospect theory reached the young economist Richard Thaler, it explained his puzzles, such as the endowment effect, and helped launch behavioural economics.
Sources
- Daniel Kahneman: Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Adversarial collaboration Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.