Daniel Kahneman left his mark on academia (and the real world) in countless ways. A group of his friends and colleagues recently gathered in Chicago to reflect on this legacy — and we were there, with microphones.
Today on Freakonomics Radio, a very special episode, a conversation about the late Daniel Kahneman, whose insights into human behavior have been threaded through this show for years, ideas like confirmation bias and loss aversion, and the planning fallacy.
During this conversation, we also learn about a research paradigm that Kahneman embraced called adversarial collaboration, which means working shoulder to shoulder with your rivals.
He felt that this is the right way to do science.
Kahneman was a phenomenally influential psychologist who won a Nobel Prize in economics, wrote the bestselling book thinking Fast and slow, and left behind an army of collaborators, mentees, and admirers.
With them, we will take a careful look at the life and mind of Danny Kahneman, starting now.
This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything, with your host, Stephen Dubnere.
Last month, in a sunlit auditorium overlooking the Chicago river, there was a gathering of psychologists, economists, and other social scientists.
This was the behavioral decision, research and management conference.
The keynote event was supposed to be a conversation with Danny Kahneman, facilitated by Richard Thaler, his longtime friend and collaborator.
Thaler is the University of Chicago economist who helped turn Kahneman's insights into the field now known as behavioral economics.
But when Kahneman died in March at age 90, Thaler came up with a new plan for the conference.
Now it would pay tribute to Danny Kahneman.
Freakonomics radio was lucky enough to be asked along to moderate a couple of panel discussions about his life and work.
The episode youre about to hear is a condensed version of those conversations.
This all took place at the downtown outpost of the University of Chicagos business School, in front of a couple hundred attendees.
Some of the panelists had known Danny Kahneman for many decades.
For instance, the psychologist Maya Bar Hillel.
Her father was a philosophy professor at Hebrew university in Jerusalem, where Kahneman got his undergraduate degree.
My father taught Danny and gave him a lot of grief, but my father apparently gave just about everybody a lot of grief.
He was a tough minded philosopher, and.